On Wed, Oct 02, 2002 at 12:21:04PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote: > > bin:*:2: > > HELP: No files on my system are owned by user or group bin. What > good are they? Historically they were probably the owners of > binaries in /bin? It is not mentioned in the FHS, debian > policy, or the changelogs of base-passwd or base-files.
Yes, bin is a group from the history of UNIX, and you are correct in its use. I can't actually tell you why, but files in /usr/bin (and other bin directories) were once commonly owned by user bin and group bin. I think HP-UX and Solaris still do it that way, and the bin account's home directory is /usr/bin (on those machines /bin is just a symlink to /usr/bin). I vaguely remember reading that the bin user was sometimes used to run daemons, too. > > sys:*:3: > > HELP: As with bin, except I don't even know what it was good for > historically. I can't give you a real reason on this either, but I do know that device files under /dev are sometimes owned by group sys. I think some other files are also commonly owned by root:sys, but off the top of my head I don't remember what kind. -- Michael Heironimus -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
