System users are those used to run services such as DNS, mail, web servers, and so forth. The reason for this is security; if all services ran as the superuser, they could act without restriction.
Examples of system users are daemon
,
operator
, bind
(for
the Domain Name Service), news
, and
www
.
nobody
is the generic unprivileged
system user. However, it is important to keep in mind that the
more services that use nobody
, the more
files and processes that user will become associated with, and
hence the more privileged that user becomes.
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Questions that are not answered by the
documentation may be
sent to <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>.
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