[nebbyknutz]

hi all,

has anybody experienced problems escaping their screen saver when they have a Terminal session open, logged in as root? i was root in a terminal the other day, and i invoked the screen saver to show a friend something, and when i tried to escape it, well....i couldn't! nothing i did escaped the screensaver, and i ended up having to force shutdown with the power button (highly drastic and completely undesireable, but as far as i was able to determine, unavoidable).

i'm not sure if having Terminal open, logged in as root, causes this behavior or not. that's part of the reason why i'm making this post! the other thing i should mention is that i had password protection on at the time....so i was thinking maybe, being logged into a Terminal as root, using a root password which is wholly different from my default user admin password, might have something to do with why it froze up on me.

has anybody run into anything similar to this? again, i'm not sure any of the above (logged into Terminal as root, password-on-screensaver activated) played any kind of a causal role, but it seems a bit too weird to be merely a coincidence.

all insight is welcome!

[Angus_D]

Just tried it, worked as expected. I can see no way in which having a Terminal open as root would affect the behaviour of the screensaver, either, but with OS X anything is possible

[moki]

Standard disclaimer about logging in as root: it really is a very bad idea; you an inadvertantly muck up permissions in a major way, and cause other kinds of trouble, even if you "know what you're doing".

Okay, with that preaching out of the way, you might consider installing EscapePod for such emergency situations.

It is a free little program that will kill either the frontmost app, or force-logout, by hitting a keystroke:

http://www.AmbrosiaSW.com/utilities/freebies/

[Millennium]

Grammar problem in the original post...

Are you saying that you're logged in as root, and have a Terminal session open? Or are you logged in as someone else, and have a Terminal open where you've su'd to root?

As moki says, logging in as root via the GUI is unnecessary and monumentally foolish. On the other hand, su'ing to root in the Terminal, while not as safe as using sudo, is still safer.

[brainchild2b]

What screensaver module? The MacAquarium one did this to me the other day.

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by Millennium:
On the other hand, su'ing to root in the Terminal, while not as safe as using sudo, is still safer.

How is it any less safe than using sudo?

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Angus_D:
How is it any less safe than using sudo?

It's only less safe in that su drops you to a shell, whereal sudo executes the command for you and then gets out of root. That leaves a somewhat greater possibility for errors. Of course, you can just sudo yourself a shell, and then there's no difference at all, but other than that, sudo is just an extra level of caution more than anything else.

It's not much safer than su, just a little. Enough that while it's somewhat preferable to use sudo it's not really worth getting worked up about. Unlike, say, logging in as root.