Logins

[Rahul Sundaram]

akonstam at trinity.edu wrote:

>I am curious. Could someone give me a concrete example of why it is
>more dangerous to log in to a gui interface as root as  opposed to
>logging in as an ordinary user and su - to root?
>  
>
Age old policy of least privileges. Users logging as root in a GUI tend 
to run all the applications as root regardless of whether the 
application requires it. If you run a application after doing an su -, 
you can immediately exit the shell as soon as you run the command 
without interrupting your other tasks, unless you launch a new GUI login 
merely to run a particular administrative task In fact these users 
probably should be using sudo to perform such operations.

regards
Rahul