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> I agree, but can't I do the same thing with a su command in a terminal
> window?
>
> I have been running as root for 2 years and never have I typed a command
> like that. I gather from what everyone is saying that as non root user,
> If I do become careless, I have less chance of deleting something I want
> to keep. But is that the only advantage to being non root on the system
> I described?
If you happen to run some program that does the wrong thing (like
accidently trying to do something like 'rm -rf /') on your behalf,
and you're an unpriveleged user, you're a bit safer than if you're
always root.
With browser plugins, and code you download from the net in general,
being a regular user as the default is a little safer than always being
root.
There have been exploits even in console based unix mailers.
I also used to work in an enviornment where we'd play tricks on each
other if we left our systems unlocked when we walked away from
them...one day, one co-worker walked away from their system and left a
root terminal open - another co-worker put 'shutdown -r' in root's crontab
to be executed every ten minutes.
Needless to say it was funny, but the victim became extremely frustrated
trying to figure out why their system would spontaneously reboot when
everything they could think of looked fine. It cost them a good chunk
of time...
k
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