Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Message-ID: <414F820D.4CC7D1A8@dessent.net> Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 18:21:17 -0700 From: Brian Dessent Organization: My own little world... MIME-Version: 1.0 To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Subject: Re: SYSTEM user passwd References: <24BDFF97F1939B44BCBA2E6AADEB0A28246FDA AT mailsc DOT engineering DOT netscaler DOT com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-IsSubscribed: yes Reply-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Prakash Khemani wrote: > On installing CYGWIN on my WinXP machine - it created a user called > SYSTEM in my /etc/passwd directory. SYSTEM is a built-in user account on every[1] Windows machine. Cygwin did not create it, merely put a line in /etc/passwd that acknowledges it. The account would exist even if Cygwin had never been installed. Tip: Run Task Manager, select the "Processes" tab, and make sure the "User name" column is enabled (View -> Select Columns if not.) You will see that all your services are run as this account. If you are using XP or later you will also see the additional accounts NETWORK SERVICE and LOCAL SERVICE in addition to SYSTEM. > If I go to Control Panel -> User Accounts then there is only one local > user listed - and that is Administrator. It is a built-in system account, it will not be listed there. It cannot be used as a normal account anyway. > I can't do the same with the user SYSTEM. What is the password for the > SYSTEM user - I tried the Administrator password but that didn't work. There is none, you cannot log on to Windows as SYSTEM. You can however start processes as that user (as the above example with Task Manager should show.) Search/google the archives of this list for "sysbash" for an example of how to get a bash prompt as the SYSTEM user. However, that's hardly ever required unless you're trying to debug a service that will not start. > My username, even though it is in the Administrators group, is not able > to read files owned by SYSTEM and having permissions same as -rwx------. That's normal too. That is how POSIX permissions work. If you are not the owner you have no r, w, or x access for a file with permissions 700. If you want to read the file you'll either need to first either change the ownership ("man chown") or change the permissions ("man chmod"), or both. Since this file was likely created by a service you do NOT want to blindly change its ownership to "Administrator" as then it will no longer be able to read/write the file, unless you modify the permissions as well. Brian [1] Not counting 95, 98, ME, which have no real notion of accounts anyway. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/