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rimvydukas

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 3, 2009
31
5
Hi,

So I have 10.7.3 Lion installed and I have root account enabled. I'm working with ordinary admin user. So while working as this user I selected "login window" option and when login window appeared I entered root login and password(fast user switching). So now I'm logged in with admin user and root user. Ok, great till then. I did few admin tasks with root user and tried to log out by pressing on apple-->Log out... Nothing happened. Tried few more times. Nothing. Ok switched to my admin user. And great thing is that I had pathfinder started as I saw that it canceled logout. What a....? Pressed ok and swithed back to root. Choosed to log out once more. Now switched back to admin user immediately. And I saw nice logout message:/ What is goin on? Why is Lion trying to log out my admin user when I'm trying to log out root user? There was no such thing in Leopard for sure:( Can anyone help me with this? Thanks.
 

throAU

macrumors G3
Feb 13, 2012
8,818
6,985
Perth, Western Australia
Erm.


Why are you logging in as root? You know that's not really supported yeah?


If you need to log in, and do stuff as root in the terminal, just run sudo?

You can get a root terminal if you are an admin user by doing:

MacBook-Pro:~ jrose$ sudo su -
Password:
MacBook-Pro:~ root#
 

rimvydukas

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 3, 2009
31
5
Here is an excerpt from Apple KB:)

The user named "root" is a special user in UNIX-style operating systems that has read and write privileges to all areas of the file system. The root user should only be used for specific administration or monitoring tasks. After completing a task as the root user, you should log out of Mac OS X and log back in using a normal or administrator account.

I don't know why are you saying that such thing is not supported... Even Apple has article how to enable root user.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1528

And exactly as said in this excerpt I'm using root for specific administration tasks - one of them was to change all users home location.

As for now my solution for this problem was to kill root's login window through terminal but I wonder why is Lion trying to log out my admin user when I'm trying to log out root user.
 

Mr. Retrofire

macrumors 603
Mar 2, 2010
5,064
518
www.emiliana.cl/en
The user named "root" is a special user in UNIX-style operating systems that has read and write privileges to all areas of the file system.
Wrong. Root users cannot modify the
Code:
/.Trashes
directory. Only the super user (or code which runs with EUID 0 and EGID 0) has full access to the Mac OS X file systems. I wrote a search tool, and found out, that root users can do more than "ordinary" admin users, but do not have full access to certain parts of the file system.
 
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