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robg: I can't believe you posted this "hint"!
Fork me, and here I've been assuming that "Works" implies accurately written. That accuracy is a given. Ever heard of Rube Goldberg? He was an inventor that specialized in coming up with ridiculously elaborate ways to do simple things. Take, for example, his simplified pencil sharpener: Open window (A) and fly kite (B). String (C) lifts small door (D) allowing moths (E) to escape and eat red flannel shirt (F). As weight of shirt becomes less, shoe (G) steps on switch (H) which heats electric iron (I) and burns hole in pants (J). Smoke (K) enters hole in tree (L), smoking out opossum (M) which jumps into basket (N), pulling rope (O) and lifting cage (P), allowing woodpecker (Q) to chew wood from pencil (R), exposing lead. Emergency knife (S) is always handy in case opossum or the woodpecker gets sick and can't work. It'll work, I guess, but no one can seriously say that this is a "simple" way to sharpen a pencil. Much of the advice published on this site comes across the same way that Goldberg's over-complex inventions did. Yes, most of them work, in that they will ultimately accomplish what they set out to accomplish, but more often than not there's a much more streamlined way to accomplish the same thing. Moreover, any hint that tells the user to log in as root is playing with fire. Sometimes, that or something like it is necessary -- there are some things that just have to be done with elevated access priviliges. On the other hand, requesting these priviliges through sudo is usually more prudent than opening up a root shell, or god forbid activating the root account and logging into Aqua as root -- hint, THAT IS NEVER NECESSARY. EVER. And in some cases, as this hint, the person submitting the hint tells people to log in as root for no reason at all. This hint is actually a clear example of the trend: the Finder, like most every other application most people run, is launched with your user account's ownership & priviliges. If it was running under a system account, then it would make sense to use root to tinker with it, but that's not the case here. Therefore, there's no reason at all to invoke root here, via sudo or otherwise. (Hint: if you do a ps -aux and the process you want to kill is running under your account, then you don't need root access to work with that process. Get it?) Gee, Rob, but that kinda calls into question the integrity of all these hints, doesn't it? Of the site itself? Well, in my opinion -- yes. Unfortunately. Please don't get me wrong -- there's a lot of great material here! However, there's also a lot of landmines: hints suggesting doing irresponsible things, or accomplishing reasonable things in a sloppy way. It would be all to easy to pick up a lot of bad habits by copying everything you see here without developing an awareness of this kind of thing. And unfortunately for new users, I can see where this kind of thing might not be obvious. Honestly, in my opinion, the best way to get a feel for this is either buy & read a great Unix book like Unix Power Tools, or find some good mailing lists or Usenet groups where there are experienced, knowledgable people to learn from. This site isn't a bad resource to turn to, but it really just skims the surface and never quite seems to put the pieces together in a coherent way. This is okay, as far as it goes, but it really helps to seek out a deeper understanding of things as well... --- |
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