Wheel (computing)

Short description: Type of user account in Unix systems

In Unix operating systems, the term wheel refers to a user account with a wheel bit, a system setting that provides additional special system privileges that empower a user to execute restricted commands that ordinary user accounts cannot access.[1][2]

## Contents

* 1 Origins
* 2 Wheel group
* 3 Wheel war
* 4 See also
* 5 References

## Origins

The term wheel was first applied to computer user privilege levels after the introduction of the TENEX operating system, later distributed under the name TOPS-20 in the 1960s and early 1970s.[2][3] The term was derived from the slang phrase big wheel, referring to a person with great power or influence.[1]

In the 1980s, the term was imported into Unix culture due to the migration of operating system developers and users from TENEX/TOPS-20 to Unix.[2]

## Wheel group

Modern Unix systems generally use user groups as a security protocol to control access privileges. The wheel group is a special user group used on some Unix systems, mostly BSD systems,[citation needed] to control access to the su[4][5] or sudo command, which allows a user to masquerade as another user (usually the super user).[1][2][6] Debian-like operating systems create a group called `sudo` with purpose similar to that of a wheel group.[citation needed]

## Wheel war

The phrase wheel war, which originated at Stanford University,[7] is a term used in computer culture, first documented in the 1983 version of The Jargon File. A 'wheel war' was a user conflict in a multi-user (see also: multiseat) computer system, in which students with administrative privileges would attempt to lock each other out of a university's computer system, sometimes causing unintentional harm to other users.[8]

## See also

* Superuser

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "Wheel". Jargon File 4.4.7. Eric S. Raymond. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel.html.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 "Wheel bit". Jargon File 4.4.7. Eric S. Raymond. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-bit.html.
3. ↑ "TWENEX". Jargon File 4.4.7. Eric S. Raymond. http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/TWENEX.html.
4. ↑ "su(1) - OpenBSD manual pages". https://man.openbsd.org/su.
5. ↑ "su". https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=su&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+11.1-RELEASE+and+Ports&arch=default&format=html.
6. ↑ Levi, Bozidar (2002). UNIX Administration: A Comprehensive Sourcebook for Effective Systems and Network Management. CRC Press. p. 207. ISBN 0-8493-1351-1.
7. ↑ Raymond. "Jargon File". Jargon File 2.1.1. Eric S. Raymond. http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-2.1.1.dos.txt.
8. ↑ Steele. "Jargon File". Jargon File 1.5.0. http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-1.5.0.dos.txt.

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