Root user

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[edit] root

root is the almighty user on every Linux system. A user, by default, cannot modify anything system-wide or perform any actions on the computer. For example, a user by default cannot restart the network connection. Obviously this and many other actions would make using the computer for a normal user very hard. There are at least three ways to run a program as root root

  1. Login to the computer as root directly (bad idea)
  2. Execute su - as your normal user to switch to the root user (better)
  3. Execute sudo <program> to run program with root access (best)

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