Question regarding groups

[Low_Level_Owl]

O.K.

I've been fooling around with Red Hat 9.0 for the last few days and I have a question. I think I know the answer but I just have to be sure.

I created a user and I want it to have the same administrative rights as "root". Would I just have to add this user to the "root" group?

[Gollo]

Short answer: no

Longer answer: If you need root access to run a command from the command prompt you just type in: su root and the input the root password. You can then run all commands as root. When done type exit and you will revert to your account. This is just how it works. You can pretty much run any program you like as any user. The installation is usually what requires root access. You can do a lot of nasty stuff to your puter if you run as root. Also even if you were to add your username to the root group chances are the permissions set on any given file are only for user and not group, meaning you would have to set all permissions to allow rwx for the group and then set the group as root or whatever. Cheers.

[craigmodius]

like Gollo said yes and no :)

I made myself a member of root on my Mandrake box, and it did help clear up some things like when I was setting up my DSL accesss if I wasn't in the group root or logged in as user root then no dice. As soon as I dropped my username into the group root then it magically worked fine.

However, I still have to su or type the root password to the prompts requiring root access.

[+Daemon+]

if it isnt already installed "sudo" will allow you to setup certain things that only root can do to certain users

like lets say shutdown -h now

well in the sudoers conf file you can add the user to beable to type that command without becomming root first.

sudo is somthing you might want.