There are plenty of good reasons to run as root. On systems without capacility functions, it's the only way to get privileged access to restricted resources. For instance, Apache is usually suid root so that it can listen on port 80 (only accessable to root). It then switches users but keeps the network socket.

Perl programs can do this fairly reliably in the Unix world by passing the socket handle through a pipe to an unprivileged child, or just passing the relevant data.

I agree that programmers should avoid writing programs that run as root, but a lot of mine do because they automate system admin jobs that must be done as root.

avoid running the prog as root in the first place, unless this program will never live on a machine that ever gets connected to the internet.

Your operating system runs as root, you know :)

____________________
Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.