[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

You're obviously accepting a self-defeatist attitude.

Again with the snarky attitude mocking what I have said. What gives?

If, after all of this, you still disagree with what we are saying, fine - still doesn't justify the snarky attitude, we just disagree. As dzp said, what is the big fuss?

[CharlesS]

I don't care to read this entire flame war, just to toss my 2¢ in:

1. I have had OS X since the original 10.0, build 4K78, and I've never needed to enable the root account for anything. This is because there is precisely nothing that you can do while logged in as root that you can't do more easily using other methods.

2. No GUI app, Carbon or Cocoa, should ever be launched as root. When you launch a GUI app as root you open yourself up to tons of security issues. There used to be an AppleScript exploit that allowed any arbitrary process to launch any tool they wanted as root, as long as just one Cocoa app was running as root somewhere in the system. It's been fixed now, but it took years and multiple major OS releases for Apple to fix it, for the simple reason that launching GUI apps as root is something that should not be done anyway. There are probably other similar, not-yet-detected exploits. Running GUI apps as root is bad. Incidentally, logging in as root causes a whole ton of GUI apps to launch as root. The upshot of this is DON'T LOG IN AS ROOT.

3. If there is a simple, GUI way to do something, and a comparatively arcane, Terminal way to do the same thing, it makes more sense to advise the user to do the simple method. I sometimes get the impression that people on the Internet think it's somehow impressive that they were able to read a man page. It is not. Given a few man pages to read, most eight-year-olds could probably learn how to use tools like rm, ls, chmod, and the rest with the various command line switches available to those tasks. It's not like they're complicated. They're just often unnecessary knowledge for most people to clutter their brains with. Anyone who thinks that having read a few man pages is impressive will probably be equally impressed that you know about the Finder's authentication system. Just sayin'.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

I don't care to read this entire flame war, just to toss my 2¢ in:

1. I have had OS X since the original 10.0, build 4K78, and I've never needed to enable the root account for anything. This is because there is precisely nothing that you can do while logged in as root that you can't do more easily using other methods.

2. No GUI app, Carbon or Cocoa, should ever be launched as root. When you launch a GUI app as root you open yourself up to tons of security issues. There used to be an AppleScript exploit that allowed any arbitrary process to launch any tool they wanted as root, as long as just one Cocoa app was running as root somewhere in the system. It's been fixed now, but it took years and multiple major OS releases for Apple to fix it, for the simple reason that launching GUI apps as root is something that should not be done anyway. There are probably other similar, not-yet-detected exploits. Running GUI apps as root is bad. Incidentally, logging in as root causes a whole ton of GUI apps to launch as root. The upshot of this is DON'T LOG IN AS ROOT.

Good advice! It is also a bad idea to run a Unix service as root under Linux/BSD for the same reason...

3. If there is a simple, GUI way to do something, and a comparatively arcane, Terminal way to do the same thing, it makes more sense to advise the user to do the simple method. I sometimes get the impression that people on the Internet think it's somehow impressive that they were able to read a man page. It is not. Given a few man pages to read, most eight-year-olds could probably learn how to use tools like rm, ls, chmod, and the rest with the various command line switches available to those tasks. It's not like they're complicated. They're just often unnecessary knowledge for most people to clutter their brains with. Anyone who thinks that having read a few man pages is impressive will probably be equally impressed that you know about the Finder's authentication system. Just sayin'.

No disagreement there. The only thing I wonder about is from a social engineering perspective, whether at some point getting people into the habit of brainlessly typing in their password in the OS X GUI might be the basis for some effective attacks. The one advantage to typing a Unix command has is that it is very explicit and clear as to what you are doing providing you understand the syntax.

That being said, I'm not suggesting that we should replace anything with CLI commands or that anything should change really, and this doesn't pertain to novice users. However, personally I prefer to use the CLI for potentially damaging things when available rather than trusting some random person's shareware/freeware GUI (i.e. a non-Apple GUI). This doesn't offer any guarantees either, I guess (unless the command is a non-proprietary sort of tool that's been around forever), but it's still often a little more direct and explicit as to what is going on. For example, I sort of cringe when I come across suggestions like "having some weird OS X problem? Go and download Cocktail or some other sort of 'maintenance' utility, and without understanding what it is doing and why just click the big button and hope for the best".

I don't know if this makes any sense...

[Spheric Harlot]

^ That makes sense.

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Again with the snarky attitude mocking what I have said. What gives?

If, after all of this, you still disagree with what we are saying, fine - still doesn't justify the snarky attitude, we just disagree. As dzp said, what is the big fuss?

Again: the Big Fuss is about accomplished and highly intelligent people being made to feel too stupid for this computer stuff by people with the attitude that any "smart" person ought to learn this stuff.

I deal with these people on a daily basis. They're bent out of shape. I agree with you that they shouldn't be.

Stop making them.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

^ That makes sense.

Again: the Big Fuss is about accomplished and highly intelligent people being made to feel too stupid for this computer stuff by people with the attitude that any "smart" person ought to learn this stuff.

I deal with these people on a daily basis. They're bent out of shape. I agree with you that they shouldn't be.

Stop making them.

Well then, please do not project this on to me, that is not fair. I'm not attempting to make anybody feel stupid, and it doesn't appear that dzp feels that way either. That is not my scene, I'm not the Jimmy Fallon Nick the IT guy character. Please save your ire for somebody who is trying to make people feel stupid.

If you are one of those people that sort of carries grudges from thread to thread, it would depend on the thread, but there are many occasions when I write in a terse fashion that is to-the-point without the pleasantries that might make people feel less self-conscious to save time because the amount of time I spend here is bad enough as it is. Even then, it is still not fair to assume that my objective is to make people feel stupid, that is not something I do.

I'm glad we have (hopefully) resolved this?

[Oisín]

Well then, please do not project this on to me, that is not fair. I'm not attempting to make anybody feel stupid, and it doesn't appear that dzp feels that way either. That is not my scene, I'm not the Jimmy Fallon Nick the IT guy character. Please save your ire for somebody who is trying to make people feel stupid.

I don’t think anyone’s saying you’re trying to make people feel stupid—but that can easily be the upshot of it. I know from personal experience (not being much of a *nix whiz myself) that when you come across some seemingly simple little problem that you just happen not to know the answer for, and the people you ask for help give you instructions that involve doing (what, to someone who’s never had the need/occasion to learn any of this stuff, seems like) *nix mumbo-jumbo and such things … then you end up feeling a bit thick, simply because you suddenly have a lot of unexpected information thrown at you at once. Especially if it’s information you don’t fully understand or see any realistic future use for.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

No disagreement there. The only thing I wonder about is from a social engineering perspective, whether at some point getting people into the habit of brainlessly typing in their password in the OS X GUI might be the basis for some effective attacks. The one advantage to typing a Unix command has is that it is very explicit and clear as to what you are doing providing you understand the syntax.

That last bit is the rub. Most people neither understand the syntax nor care to (it's just not necessary for most people's daily lives), and thus if you keep shoving command-line solutions at them, they're going to get in the habit of blindly entering any magical incantation they find on the Web, which I would argue is far worse than anything the GUI could condition you to do (anyone remember all those "jokes" people used to think were so hilarious around the time 10.0 came out, where they'd tell unsuspecting users to type "sudo rm -rf /" in the Terminal* while telling them it would do something other than erase all attached disks? I do).

Of course, sometimes the command line is the only way to do something, and then, you're kind of stuck. But deleting a file isn't one of those cases.

* by the way, don't run this. It will erase all attached disks.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Oisín 

I don’t think anyone’s saying you’re trying to make people feel stupid—but that can easily be the upshot of it. I know from personal experience (not being much of a *nix whiz myself) that when you come across some seemingly simple little problem that you just happen not to know the answer for, and the people you ask for help give you instructions that involve doing (what, to someone who’s never had the need/occasion to learn any of this stuff, seems like) *nix mumbo-jumbo and such things … then you end up feeling a bit thick, simply because you suddenly have a lot of unexpected information thrown at you at once. Especially if it’s information you don’t fully understand or see any realistic future use for.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you are saying, an example would help, but let me try to at least give you a different perspective on this which might put a different spin on this.

When we reach the end of our rope of what we know we can either just give up, or keep on going until we find an answer. Unix often provides a way to go beyond the end of that rope in terms of what tracing and troubleshooting techniques are available within a GUI, and when we reach the end of that rope sometimes it is the most productive to examine a problem at a lower level which Unix also often enables us to do. The better a programmer or an IT person is, the better they are at being able to conceptualize concepts at lower levels of computing, generally speaking.

Therefore, there are sometimes two valid reasons for hauling out the Unix mumbo jumbo: to help somebody beyond the end of their rope if they really want to go there (and if they don't have the ability to do so, at least get a taste of what would be involved for the sake of closure, curiosity, evaluation of how much further time they want to put in, etc.), and to help provide new perspective on a problem by providing an additional lens of looking at it at a lower level.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

That last bit is the rub. Most people neither understand the syntax nor care to (it's just not necessary for most people's daily lives), and thus if you keep shoving command-line solutions at them, they're going to get in the habit of blindly entering any magical incantation they find on the Web, which I would argue is far worse than anything the GUI could condition you to do (anyone remember all those "jokes" people used to think were so hilarious around the time 10.0 came out, where they'd tell unsuspecting users to type "sudo rm -rf /" in the Terminal* while telling them it would do something other than erase all attached disks? I do).

Of course, sometimes the command line is the only way to do something, and then, you're kind of stuck. But deleting a file isn't one of those cases.

* by the way, don't run this. It will erase all attached disks.

Yes, blindly copying and pasting Unix commands you don't understand is probably about the worst thing one can do... No disagreement from me there.

Still, I remember when I was first learning Unix that I did a bit of that, particularly when my patience started to wear down. The one saving grace there is that Unix/Linux environments are incredibly consistent in how these commands are structured, how they interact with each other, and what sort of output can be expected (e.g. no response = success), etc. If somebody really wanted to learn this stuff for the purpose of eventually landing a job, doing something on a Linux system, getting a program working, passing a course, or running one of those Java games that we keep on getting threads about, exposing them to the CLI syntax is not necessary a bad thing.

I agree that shoving down throats in general is not a good thing, and I definitely agree that none of what I wrote applies to most people, but in a place like this it seems like there is such a divergent range of interests, motivations, aspirations, etc. It can be hard to get a read on people, such as those people that wanted to run those Java games, people that seem concerned about some aspect of security, etc. I don't see much harm in interjecting some Unix mumbo jumbo from time to time.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you are saying, an example would help

I’m saying basically what SH has been saying in this thread as well: if you’re an average Mac user who uses Macs because that’s just what you use and they work and they’re easy, and then suddenly you have an issue like these two huge files that appear without you having a clue what they are—then most of the time, you’ll just be looking for a simple answer, not a complex one.

If you happen to want to actually learn about this, fine, good for you. But the average user, upon finding out that one is necessary and the other should be deleted, would probably just try to delete the file, no fuss (if they knew where to find it).

In this case, since the average user has no idea that the file is owned by root (nor, most likely, what that means), explaining how and why you need to enable the root user, log on as root, do this, do that—that’s all way over the top. The easiest way to delete the file is to navigate to it (once you’ve been told where it resides), and then just delete it the regular way. As long as someone informs you beforehand that you’ll have to key in an admin user name and password so this doesn’t surprise you or make you suspicious, Bob’s your uncle.

You and I, and many others here, would find it only natural and a matter of course to investigate why this is happening, what it is, how to deal with it, etc. But that’s because this kind of thing lies within our interest range. If it didn’t we wouldn’t (likely) be bothered to want to get to the real bottom of the issue, we’d just want it fixed so that we can focus on what does interest us. For example, when our washing machines downstairs break down, I really don’t want to have someone explain to me what kind of tools I’d need to be using to open which spools and replace which thingamajigs, nor do I care what kind of wiring is optimal for a three-machine setup such as ours—I just want them to work, ’cause I have no interest in washing machines. They’re tools that just need to be there, and just need to work.

That’s how most users feel about their computers. Overload them with information, even if its meant to be helpful and instructive, and they’ll just glaze over and lose interest as soon as you’ve shown them what buttons need to be pressed to fix it. And if they get bombarded with information about systems they’ve never even looked at, they’ll naturally be left with a feeling of incompetence, which will be only exacerbated by the fact that it doesn’t really interest them, so they know they’re never going to bother learning this.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

How is this comparable in any way?

If somebody is coming to you for help, it means they they need certain information that is relevant to them. Teaching this person how to fish, so to speak, is not akin to teaching them about open sea sailing or anything else. The better analogy would be that that somebody is coming to you as a sailor for some basic information you can either sail them to where they want to go, or expose them to a little something that might lead to them eventually being able to sail for themselves.

If somebody is asking how to find and delete a certain file, HOW ON EARTH is giving them precise instructions on how to enable the root account going to encourage "learning", or indeed even "relevant information"?

Rote following of instructions has NOTHING to do with "learning", let alone understanding.

Teach a carpenter to fish when he's far busier than you are and you're wasting his time. Show him where to find a fisherman or just give him a simple answer using tools he's already familiar with, and you're actually doing him a favor.


Tell him that any "smart" person should be interested and want to learn these things, and he may be thankful enough for your help not to smack you in the gob, but he sure as hell won't ever call you again.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

If somebody is asking how to find and delete a certain file, HOW ON EARTH is giving them precise instructions on how to enable the root account going to encourage "learning", or indeed even "relevant information"?

Rote following of instructions has NOTHING to do with "learning", let alone understanding.

Teach a carpenter to fish when he's far busier than you are and you're wasting his time. Show him where to find a fisherman or just give him a simple answer using tools he's already familiar with, and you're actually doing him a favor.


Tell him that any "smart" person should be interested and want to learn these things, and he may be thankful enough for your help not to smack you in the gob, but he sure as hell won't ever call you again.

Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting that anybody enable their root account, that wasn't me... I'm simply using this opportunity to address this in a more general way. You're right though, it depends on the situation and the user. I wouldn't inundate dzp with Unix stuff either for this particular thing beyond just giving them the command they would need if I didn't think of the Finder's Go to Folder command and Finder root auth. However, in the mac osx webserver thread, for instance, that's a different story, no?

[auto_immune]

You can also delete daily.out from within console.app (Applications/Utilities/Console)