Whats up Everybody?! I am still somewhat new to macs but I was curious about looking up my user accounts through terminal on my macbook pro late 2011, Snow Leopard 10.6.8. I checked out a couple of forums and tried out this command line in terminal: dscl . list /Users | grep -v "^_". after I typed it in my four main user accounts popped up plus a "root", a "daemon" and a "nobody". What are the "root", the "daemon" and the "nobody" accounts? Why is there even a "nobody" account? Is this a hacker created hidden account? Thanks everyone.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Hacked Computer
- Thread starter astojazz1
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
root and daemon are part of the Unix underpinnings of OSX. Root is the super user account that has full access to the system and daemon is a unix process.
wiki
wiki
Although I can't answer your question I will say it's not a hacker, it's never a hacker. Hackers randomly attacking peoples computers is Hollywood BS.
EDIT: Ninja'd by Maflynn!
No they don't. Sounds like everything is just fine. Nothing was hacked. All those accounts are normal and are on a brand new Mac.
No disrespect, but if you are "somewhat new on macs" then if you start messing around with terminal commands whilst you clearly don't know what you are doing and are so suspicious as to imagine the first thing you don't understand is a hacker, you are likely to damage something, possibly irretrievably.
Perhaps get a book on Unix, or create a VM and mess around inside that before a malicious or mistyped terminal command causes you a lot more problems.
Since new to macs (and new to linux/bsd/unix as you have never seen daemon) I am assuming you come from windows. Your windows equivalent would be the term
windows service accounts
basic user accounts created to run system services. Long story short, you or vendor create these accounts to run services to not pester you with password requests for authentication to run the service all the time.
You see root for example as evey linux/unix/bsd os has this as a user. Its the equivalent to administrator in windows. Many flavors (to include mac os being bsd based) disable this account during install after you make that first user name on the install prompt of installer used, but its still there.
windows service accounts
basic user accounts created to run system services. Long story short, you or vendor create these accounts to run services to not pester you with password requests for authentication to run the service all the time.
You see root for example as evey linux/unix/bsd os has this as a user. Its the equivalent to administrator in windows. Many flavors (to include mac os being bsd based) disable this account during install after you make that first user name on the install prompt of installer used, but its still there.
My instincts are telling me that this "nobody" account is either BS (wikipedia, c'mon no everything on wiki is 100% fact) or that my computer has, in fact, been hacked. Thanks people.
The nobody account is not BS. It's present in Linux and BSD systems as well and has been for a long time.
So, rather than try to understand the real facts about the "nobody" user, which you have been told here is a normal part of any OS X system (and usually on any UNIX system, too), you choose to believe your "instincts" - and want to insult the knowledge of folks who actually want to help you with a good answer, and "dejo" even provided a reference so you can read some more about it.
(Oh, OK, I didn't notice your sarcasm! Ignore my rant, then! )
Alright, here's some non-Wikipedia pages that state the same thing:
System Accounts
Who is the user Nobody?
Strategies For Setting Up Groups On Unix Systems
If you chose to ignore the knowledge of those you seek help from, that's your prerogative.
The fact is, your search-fu is severely lacking, since you would have gotten the right answers within minutes of asking and would have seen yourself, that your computer is not hacked. But then again, CSI: Vancouver and all the other crime procedurals show us citizens how easily a computer can be hacked by nobody.
I disagree. And I’m tired of reading comments like this. Anyone running terminal commands is obviously comfortable enough to run terminal commands. Why not help him more so than just telling him to read a freakin book on Unix? It’s not just him who is reading your comment after all. People like you scare people away from the power of the command line—which I just think is sad personally. How the heck are they ever going to learn if they don’t try it and ask questions? Here, I’ll start, a pointer I’ve learned in working with terminal recently is as follows:
Pretty much every Mac command you can execute in a terminal from the base operating system you can find out more about by simply typing ‘man {command_name}’, replacing the {command_name}’ part with your command. If you do that with the command you just ran then it will likely tell you what the user “nobody” is—try it out—feel free to ask questions afterwards too—don’t let ppl like this discourage you. I’ve ran tons of commands myself in terminal—not fully knowing what they do—at the end of the day that’s how you learn and that’s what backups are for. Plus there are very few commands you can actually run in the terminal which will actually mess up your computer as this guy is saying.
People act like the computer other people are on are somebody else’s computer or something, and they act like you are going to mess something up of someone else’s. No, it’s my computer and if I mess it up I’ll own it—luckily for me I’m smart enough to make backups of my stuff and I’m smart enough to know the only real way to learn new things especially in regards to computers is through practice, exposing yourself to new things, getting it wrong first—asking questions—and by learning from your previous mistakes.