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Top Forums Web Development Help with opening/viewing doc file via linux terminal Post 302579770 by Corona688 on Tuesday 6th of December 2011 01:54:01 PM
Old 12-06-2011
Quote:
Originally Posted by chams
By the way, I don't understand why using sudo is dangerous (really, I'm a Linux dummy Smilie )
It runs openoffice as administrator. This is a big deal.

User accounts don't just organize your files, they exist to protect each other from unauthorized or accidental access. They can only access files they own or are allowed to access. Now, administrator can access anything on demand, up to and including your hard drive's boot sector, just by writing to the wrong files! Running any program as root means that, if you make a mistake, the consequences could be dire:
Code:
# "creative uses of rm", http://kluter.home.xs4all.nl/funnies/Section1.html

From: tzs@stein.u.washington.edu (Tim Smith)
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle

I was working on a line printer spooler, which lived in /etc.  I wanted
to remove it, and so issued the command "rm /etc/lpspl."  There was only
one problem.  Out of habit, I typed "passwd" after "/etc/" and removed
the password file.  Oops.

I called up the person who handled backups, and he restored the password
file.

A couple of days later, I did it again!  This time, after he restored it,
he made a link, /etc/safe_from_tim.

About a week later, I overwrote /etc/passwd, rather than removing it.

After he restored it again, he installed a daemon that kept a copy of
/etc/passwd, on another file system, and automatically restored it if
it appeared to have been damaged.

Fortunately, I finished my work on /etc/lpspl around this time, so we
didn't have to see if I could find a way to wipe out a couple of
filesystems...

It's not just humans that make mistakes either, buggy programs crash too, especially big complicated ones. If you don't need to trust something with root, you just don't. Running openoffice as root isn't something I'd reccomend at all.

Last edited by Corona688; 12-06-2011 at 03:00 PM..
 

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TTY(4)							     Linux Programmer's Manual							    TTY(4)

NAME
tty - controlling terminal DESCRIPTION
The file /dev/tty is a character file with major number 5 and minor number 0, usually of mode 0666 and owner.group root.tty. It is a syn- onym for the controlling terminal of a process, if any. In addition to the ioctl(2) requests supported by the device that tty refers to, the ioctl(2) request TIOCNOTTY is supported. TIOCNOTTY Detach the calling process from its controlling terminal. If the process is the session leader, then SIGHUP and SIGCONT signals are sent to the foreground process group and all processes in the current session lose their controlling tty. This ioctl(2) call only works on file descriptors connected to /dev/tty. It is used by daemon processes when they are invoked by a user at a terminal. The process attempts to open /dev/tty. If the open succeeds, it detaches itself from the terminal by using TIOCNOTTY, while if the open fails, it is obviously not attached to a terminal and does not need to detach itself. FILES
/dev/tty SEE ALSO
chown(1), mknod(1), ioctl(2), termios(3), console(4), tty_ioctl(4), ttyS(4), agetty(8), mingetty(8) COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.44 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/. Linux 2003-04-07 TTY(4)
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