TYPES OF USERS IN LINUX

System Administrator

The System Administrator (SA) is primarily responsible for the smooth operation of the system. it is the SA' s job to switch on the system console (the machine on which the operating system resides, also known as the server machine).

The SA also creates users and groups of suers for the system, and takes backups to prevent loss of data dure to system breakdown. In Linux, the SA is also known as the root user. The SA has all the rights for the Linux system.

File owner

The user who creates a file is said to be the owner of that file. The owner of afile can perform any operation on that file: copying, deleting, and editing.

Group Owner

Consider the following situation

A project of five people from the Dynasoft Consultants Inc, is working on a software development project for a private detective agency. An analyst heads the team. The other four members are programmers. The team is working on a Linux system.

Each programmer has been given a few programs to develop. The data provided by the detective agency is of a highly confidential nature, and so the data file has been created in the analyst' s HOME directory.

One programmer may have to link (join) a program to another programmer' s program in order to test the program.

In this situation, each programmer is the File Owner of his or her own program files. Each program, however, also belongs to the other programmers, so that they can use it for linking to the file or directly access to the file.

The project team of five users is said to be the Group Owner for the file. In Linux, it is possible to define the users who willl belong to a group. A group of users are also given a name, just as a user is given a name.

Other Users

In the example of the dynasoft consultants Inc; all the users of the system who are not members of the project group are referred to as Other Users for the files of that group.

Other Users who do not belong to the particular group. For example, the users belonging to the finance department could be treated as Other Users for the payroll department.