[X-Unix] App launched by my crontab runs as root if Login Window!

[John Harrold]

Sometime in June ~flipper assaulted the keyboard and produced:

| John Harrold wrote:
| 
| >I'm not sure what you mean by enabled. I don't think you can disable the
| >'root' user on a unix machine and have it work. Every time you run sudo it
| >executes commands as root. This would not be possible if the 'root' user
| >was disabled.
| 
| So, with 'root' disabled. (a misnomer, since root is not enabled in 
| the first place, having no password, no shell default, no console 
| access, etc)...

The user root may not have a password, but does have a shell. I don't know
about OS X, but I believe if root didn't have a shell it would break
many things which runs as root (i.e. daemons). I assume the login menu runs as
root.  According to the netinfo manager on my computer, root's shell is
/bin/sh.  I'm not sure what you mean by console access.  You can su to
root:

$ sudo su -

True, you cannot login as root, but programs can still be run as root.
Typically when I think of disabling a user, their shell is set to
/usr/bin/false.

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