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In computing, the superuser is a special user account used for system administration. Depending on the operating system (OS), the actual name of this account might be root , administrator , admin or supervisor .
The Unix command su, which stands for 'substitute user' [1] [2] (or historically 'superuser' [3] [4]), is used by a computer user to execute commands with the privileges of another user account. When executed it invokes a shell without changing the current working directory or the user environment.
sudo (/ s uː d uː / [4]) is a program for Unix-like computer operating systems that enables users to run programs with the security privileges of another user, by default the superuser. [5] It originally stood for "superuser do", [ 6 ] as that was all it did, and this remains its most common usage; [ 7 ] however, the official Sudo project ...
Ordinary users are granted only enough permissions to accomplish their most common tasks. UNIX systems have built-in security features. Most users cannot set up a new user account nor do other administrative procedures. The user “root” is a special user, something called super-user, which can do anything at all on the system.
URL scheme in the GNOME desktop environment to access file(s) with administrative permissions with GUI applications in a safer way, instead of sudo, gksu & gksudo, which may be considered insecure GNOME Virtual file system: admin:/ path / to / file example: gedit admin:/etc/default/grub. See more information on: app
These rights vary from user to user, and can range from anonymous login (guest) privileges to superuser (root) privileges. Guest and superuser accounts are the two extremes, as individual access rights can be denied or granted to each user. Usually, only the system administrator (a.k.a. the superuser) has the ability to grant or deny these rights.
Modern Unix systems generally use user groups as a security protocol to control access privileges. The wheel group is a special user group used on some Unix systems, mostly BSD systems, [citation needed] to control access to the su [4] [5] or sudo command, which allows a user to masquerade as another user (usually the super user).
A superuser account is an account that exists outside the scope of the system's security policy, hence in UNIX root can modify files that the permissions bits give him no access to. Single-user systems like DOS, OS <X, Win95/98/ME, and BeOS lack superuser accounts since they lack security policies.