To root or not to root?

[Gerben Wierda]

As I’m working my way to somewhat knowing what I’m doing, I have a question.

I always set the timeout on sudo on my systems to 0 seconds. So, for every sudo command I enter, I have to type the password. This is somewhat safer than having a timeout (normally 300sec).

This becomes tedious when there are many sudo commands to perform, so in that case, I often revert to running sudo -s or sudo -i, do my work as root and kill the subshell. This has risks too (e.g. doing a wrong rm command, but I’m pretty paranoiac about stuff like rm)

For my first steps with macports, I’ve run everything as root that way, because I expected there would be changes in /Library/LaunchDaemons etc and I did not want toe be typing my password all the time.

But I’m wondering if I should move back to running everything as ordinary user.

Are there disadvantages to running to port commands as root?

If I want to revert, what should I chown to that user? How should ownership in /opt be?

Gerben Wierda
Chess and the Art of Enterprise Architecture <http://enterprisechess.com/>
Mastering ArchiMate <http://masteringarchimate.com/>
Architecture for Real Enterprises <https://www.infoworld.com/blog/architecture-for-real-enterprises/> at InfoWorld
On Slippery Ice <https://eapj.org/on-slippery-ice/> at EAPJ

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