Toor: Encyclopedia II - Toor - Purpose

Toor - Purpose

In Unix, it is traditional to keep the root filesystem as small as reasonably possible, moving larger, fancier programs and rapidly-changing data to other, optional parts of the system. This increases the likelihood that the system can be brought to a semi-useable state in the case of a partial system failure. It also means that the superuser account, necessary for repairing a broken system, should not depend on any programs outside of this small core. So the 'root' account is often configured with a shell which is small, efficient, and dependable, but awkward for daily use.

The 'toor' account is intended as a solution to this problem. It is exactly equivalent to the normal 'root' superuser account, but is configured to use a different, more featureful shell.

Alternately, since they are equivalent accounts, 'toor' may be configured with the emergency shell, allowing 'root' the freedom to use the featureful one.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Purpose", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki