I just responded to a similar question. The simple answer is giving an account a UID of 0 is the same as making another root (DON'T DO THIS UNLESS YOU HAVE REALLY GOOD REASON). For example, at my office, we have a "cert" account with full root access but the password is sealed in an envelope with our security department incase of multiple bus accidents for the admins.

There is sudo -- http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/ -- which can be used to configure root access on certain commands for a given list of users.

However, I suspect the answer is much simpler. Generally, UNIX commands are broken into two major categories:

1 ) user (stored in /bin or /usr/bin)
2 ) administrative (stored in /sbin or /usr/sbin), and

User commands are for the entire user population and include such basics as ls, mkdir, cp, and vi. Whereas administrative commands are meant to be used by the system administrator for such things as mounting file systems, configuring devices, adding users, and such.

There are really very few circumstances (I'm a bit of a purist) where any account other than that of an administrator requires root access to execute a command. One common example is running backups from, say, an operator's account.

This could be a very long thread if we got into a full-blown discussion. In short, to give a non-root user access to a given command:

1 ) Set the PATH environment variable as needed,
2 ) alias the command
3 ) Use sudo ONLY if root access is absolutely required.