Unix and Linux: Visual Quickstart Guide, Fifth Edition

15. Being Root

In This Chapter

Acting Like root with sudo

Becoming root with su

Starting, Stopping, and Restarting Daemons

Changing the System Configuration

Monitoring the System

Keeping Up with watch

Checking Boot Messages with dmesg

Setting the Date and Time

Up to now, we’ve been addressing Unix tools and tips that you, as a normal user of the system, can take advantage of. And as a normal user, you can’t hurt the system as a whole—you can mess up your own files, certainly, but that’s as far as it goes. As we’ve mentioned, though, there’s also a different class of user, called “superuser,” or root. The root user has complete power within the system and can (must) handle configuration issues, software installation for everyone using the system, ...