[vox-tech] Purpose of "nobody" user?

[Bill Kendrick]

On Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 11:50:20AM -0700, Rod Roark wrote:
> I suppose someone chose the name "nobody" for one of these users
> simply to emphasize that it's not human.  But there are many other
> examples of such users, like apache, bind, daemon, mail, mysql and
> news.
> 
> I hope this is not too condescending... I wrote it this way so that
> newbies may also find it useful.

No, not at all.  Looking all the other dozens of users (lp, sys, etc.),
I explained to Melissa that it was exactly this...  putting up fences
between processes and files, so they can't clobber each other.
(Which would normally happen accidentally, or via an exploit.)

So it sounds like "nobody" is just more of a catch-all for this kind of
thing.  (e.g., back in the day, Apache ran as "nobody".  These days,
it's usually as an "apache" or "httpd" user.)

Seem like a reasonable way of explaining it?

-- 
-bill!
bill at newbreedsoftware.com
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/