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Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!mcvax!botter!ast
From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Becoming ROOT on MINIX
Message-ID: <1186@botter.cs.vu.nl>
Date: Thu, 21-May-87 02:03:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: botter.1186
Posted: Thu May 21 02:03:15 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 23-May-87 10:04:08 EDT
References: <600@dutesta.UUCP>
Reply-To: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
Lines: 16
Keywords: protection minix

In article <600@dutesta.UUCP> mol@dutesta.UUCP (Marcel Mol) writes:
>Probably this is found for the one-hundred-and-oned time,
>but becoming root isn't that difficult:
>	unmount the /usr filesystem 
>	type cntl-D

This is not a bug, it is intentional to help people who have mangled their
/usr diskette.  When a shell terminates (CTRL-D), init tries to exec
/usr/bin/login.  If that exec fails (e.g., because /usr has been unmounted
or damaged), rather than panicking, it tries to exec /bin/sh.  Thus if your
/usr diskette gets munged, you can still log in and try to save things.
If you don't like this feature, just modify init to panic if it can't
exec login.

Andy Tanenbaum