Who Is Root?

So far, user elliot has been able to do quite a few things on the system. However, there are a whole lot of things that user elliot can't do! To demonstrate, let's try to create a file named happy in the /var directory:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ touch /var/happy
touch: cannot touch '/var/happy': Permission denied

Oops! We got a Permission denied error.

Now let's try to create a new directory named games in /etc:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:/$ mkdir /etc/games
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/etc/games': Permission denied

Again! We are getting the same error, Permission denied!

So what's going on here? Well, the user elliot doesn't have permission to do whatever he wants on the system! So who then? Who has permission to do anything on the system? It's the root user.

WHO IS ROOT?

root is a Linux user that has permission to do anything on the system. root is also known as the superuser.