winscape 2291

On Tue, 18 Oct 05 10:53:18 GMT

Then it's not a bug the sysadmin doesn't know this, what the sysadmin does know is the default search path provided to all users before they start making their own ones up.

Exactly that which is the sysadmins business cannot be messed with except by the sysadmin.

Agreed - except in the case when that user leaves without hand over in which case the sysadmin has the necessary priviliges to clean up the mess - probably by copying the files to some other user and granting them permissions and then forgetting about it.

Absolutely.

Absolutely - although in unix SYS is spread around a bit inbin,sbin,usr-sbin,usr-bin and perhapsopt-bin orusr-local-bin but that's just a detail. Only the sysadmin can fiddle in these places where system wide stuff is expected to reside.

Not really - if fred and jim install packages foo and bar respectively in their own areas and both packages depend on the separately packaged library baz then fred and jim are likely to wind up both installing baz to get things to work *even if* baz has been installed in the system wide areas by the sysadmin. I don't know of any package manager that makes it easy to say install in jim-tools but try and find libraries in any of fred-tools, joe-tools or ...

Yes they got that bit right very early on :)

In UNIX read, write and execute are independent protections grouped into three sets one set for the owner of the file, one set for members of the group the file is in and one set for the rest of the world. It is possible to set some bizarre combinations (eg. writeable but not readable or executable to the rest of the world, readable but not writeable or executable to the group members, and only executable to the owner - written --xr---w-). I have found occasional use for write only permissions :)

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