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Re: root user of cygwin



On a traditional Unix system, a root user is one with uid=0 (uid is an abbreviation of user id).

On an MS-Windows NT family system (NT, 2000, XP), an administrative
account is one in the group Administrators.

I'm no expert (rather a novice in many ways with cygwin), but
I suspect that the upper concept maps probably to the lower
concept on cygwin.

The files /etc/passwd and /etc/group should reveal how the
cygwin (Unix-style) user names and group names map back
to the MS-Windows NT family SIDs. As MS-Windows implements
many of the underlying operations, it is the SIDs in
question that will govern much of what happens.
(SID = security descriptor number -- actually I forget
exactly what it abbreviates -- but it is a unique
number on your machine identifying a user, or a group.)

There are some documents about ntsec and these matters
(although I myself have trouble following them).

Hope that this tidbit above might possibly help a little.
If opaque, it at least should provide keyword fodder for
web searches :)

Cordially,

Perry





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