8 ms·
Where did the wheel group get its name?
- majewsky 8y agoHuh. And here I always thought it's because these users are allowed to "take the wheel".
- derefr 8y agoI had to stop and ponder the number of layers of humor intended when, in the movie WALL-E, the captain’s interface to the ship is a robot that resembles a ship’s helm. Yes, there’s a naval metaphor... but it’s also an example of a root user acting not through root privilege, but through wheel privilege. :)
- xenomachina 8y agoAnd then the wheel is threatened when a actual root (ie: the plant) shows up.
- bsder 8y agoIt's certainly possible. The Pixar folks had a lot of interaction with the BSD folks early on. John Lasseter, who headed up Pixar, drew the most widely known BSD Daemon, after all.
- Isamu 8y agoThe term was common at CMU in the TOPS-20 days, as a synonym for "superuser". I remember office doors with names and designations like "big wheel" and "training wheel", etc.
- janci 8y agoJesus take the wheel.
- dang 8y agoPlease don't do this here.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- koolba 8y agoI always thought it had the same meaning as in poker, i.e. the best possible low hand in a high / low game[1] and came about because the root user has id zero. [1]: http://www.poker-vibe.com/poker/terms/wheel/ http://www.poker-vibe.com/poker/terms/wheel/
- alfiedotwtf 8y agoI can't remember which BSD book it was in, but one of them mentioned that 'wheel' was reference to the Knights of the Round Table i.e not a single admin user, but a shared, equal privilege. ... my childhood was a lie
- 0care 8y agowheel is turning and you can't slow down?
- Analemma_ 8y agoEtymology is such a strange thing. This isn't a word from the mists of history and this thread already has four different proposed origins.
- pvg 8y agoIt's mostly that folk etymology is very common. The etymology of this term is not exactly mysterious.
- mcculley 8y agoI have always wondered why the admin user is named "root". It makes sense for the "root" filesystem as filesystems are structured as a tree. But the set of users is flat. Even considering groups, there is no tree structure to group membership.
- dghughes 8y agoPeople learning Linux find it confusing. They ask what root is and understand the concept of root of the file system. Then I say there is a user called root which confuses them. Then a group root only root is in it when the user root is created. But the two root words are not two groups one is the owner root (who is user root) it isn't the group.
- lyzan 8y agoI've been doing linux for awhile and that explanation is confusing to me, so I see where they're coming from. I usually oversimplify: "root" is a keyword typically used to be all incompacing. The system root contains all files in the system. The user root is a super-admin that has all user rights in the system. The group root is a super-admin group the root user is assigned to and has all group rights.
- ScottBurson 8y ago"encompassing"
- Koshkin 8y ago> The system root contains all files in the system. Note that, strictly speaking, this is a misconception. The root file system is the one which is at the root of the hierarchy of mounted file systems. Even the notion of something being (or not being) "in the system" can be misleading, because today's systems, including storage devices, can be distributed in various ways.
- dkresge 8y agoOr annoying, apparently. A good friend of mine’s father, having recently acquired a unix based POS system for his retail store, decided he’d prefer a nicer name than ‘root’. Apparently, ca. 1984 unix was rather particular about names (instead of uid) and didn’t take kindly to such. Much pain ensued.
- valenciarose 8y agoIts origins are with TENEX and from there TOPS-20. TOPS-20 was ubiquitous in computer science departments in the early 80s when I worked at DEC. The release of TENEX precedes the release of Unix by a year or so and the release of the first BSD by seven years. If you want the etymological roots for this, you would need to ask Dan Murphy or one of his contemporaries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Murphy_(computer_scientist https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Murphy_(computer_scie...
- ChuckMcM 8y agoI can confirm that it originated in TENEX. TENEX was the first operating system that DEC did for the PDP 10 architecture (a follow on to the PDP 6 architecture). Prior to that, on the PDP 8, PDP-12, and PDP-11 the various operating systems used user identification codes (UICs) and while [0, 0] was special it wasn't named. It was the UIC reserved for the Operator. TENEX introduced the notion that non-Operators could be empowered to do Operator type things (like load tapes, mount and unmount file systems, Etc.) and to do that they added privilege bits. These bits were associated with UICs and the bit that enabled Operator privileges was called the 'Wheel' bit. (anecdotally the 'big wheel') UNIX, which was developed in places where there was also a large DEC presence, used group membership like DEC applied privilege bits. The group for people with operator privileges was naturally "wheel" based on the history.
- msla 8y ago> TENEX was the first operating system that DEC did for the PDP 10 architecture No, that's TOPS-10. TENEX was TEN EXtended, the OS BBN did for the PDP-10 they extended to have paged virtual memory. TENEX is an ancestor to TOPS-20, which was a DEC product. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=361271 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=361271 > TENEX is a new time sharing system implemented on a DEC PDP-10 augmented by special paging hardware developed at BBN. https://github.com/PDP-10/tenex https://github.com/PDP-10/tenex (Lots more old -10 stuff at the user account, like WAITS and ITS.)
- ChuckMcM 8y agoOh that is awesome I stand corrected, thanks. At USC's engineering computer laboratory (at one time in the late 70's / early 80's running 7 different 10's) the install history was TENEX (given the association with BBN I expect that was why that machine was on the ARPAnet) then came TOPS-10 for some of the undergraduate accessible machines and then the TENEX machines got TOPS-20 as an upgrade. Clearly the lore as passed along to me when I was an systems programmer in one of the sister labs was incorrect. Now I have to figure out how to erase these cuniform tablets! :-)
- amyjess 8y agoHuh, I'd always assumed it referred to the wheel on a ship. Learn something new every day.
- amelius 8y agoMe too. I think it makes more sense that way.
- teddyh 8y agoRather famously, back when “su” was still part of GNU coreutils (in 2007 it was removed from default installations, and in 2012 the code was removed from the package, since other implementations existed in other packages), GNU su did not, contrary to Unix traditional behavior, restrict the usage of “su” to members of the wheel group: (Written by Richard Stallman in the manual for GNU “su”) “Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.) However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers. I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first. ” https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/coreutils-4.5.4/html_node/coreutils_149.html#SEC150 https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/coreutils-4.5.4/html_nod...
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoFor some reason, I have of memory of reading that `wheel` was from `wheelhouse` (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wheelhouse https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wheelhouse), as in the place where only navigators would have access. And I do see that in one of the downvoted stackexchange answers.
- michrassena 8y agoEven if this turns out to be false, I find it a more satisfying answer. "Big-wheel" as a source for the term seems quite colloquial, whereas "wheel-house" indicates a bit of underlying culture -- it's the slightly more sophisticated metaphor.
- Torwald 8y agoIt is a metaphor that related to the technical aspects, instead of adhering to a social hierarchy.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoWheel-house would relate, presumably, also to social hierarchies of who is allowed into the wheel-house (to pilot the ship).
- jandrese 8y agoUnfortunately the general rule with word etymology is the most sensible answer is usually wrong.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoSometimes they're fun though: e.g. derring-do is the result of misunderstandings and misprinting.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoI'm not sure so much about colloquial vs sophisticated, but "wheelhouse" feels more sensible than "big-wheel" as a source. That doesn't seem to be the received wisdom at this point though. One 'non-etymology' I regret is that Linux _isn't_ a recursive acronym for "Linux Is Not UniX".
- a-dub 8y agoHah. Interesting. All along I thought it was the group for the poor bastards who had to share the UNIX chore wheel.
- INTPenis 8y agoMy favorite piece of Unix curiosa to add in this thread is that there was once, briefly, a Unix where the root user was called "avatar". This amused me when I found out about it so I started using it as my username on IRC. Meaning the name that shows up in your vhost when you join channels, back in the days people who joined with root@host would be yelled at for using IRC as root. So I joined with avatar@host and no one cared. :)
- raldi 8y agoYeah, I used Windows NT for a while in the late 90's and named my user account "root" just for cognitive dissonnace. But then when I'd launch an IRC client, it would put that in my identification string and I'd get kicked off of channels (or whole servers) with the message, "Don't IRC as root."
- blancNoir 8y ago"My dad's a pretty big wheel down at the cracker factory." -- Milhouse Van Houten