I know toor has been around awhile, other then being root spelled backwards I've never seen much point to it. The super user account being named root is more tradition then purposeful imho, aside from any body that assumes there is a 'root' >_>
There is nothing to stop us from creating, say an account named kwyjibo with a UID of 0, assuming we had access to such an account ourselves. I think I've heard of one or two people that actually bothered.
I've always operated under the assumption that the kernel see's numerical UID, GID, and a bitmask of file permissions where we see usernames, group names, and -rwx--* stuff.
Having predominately used systems where roots standard shell has tab completion available (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, many Linux distros), I've never bothered to use any thing but the default for roots,. So I've never thought about simply using toor, just an exec if I ever needed an automated change.
In the case of FreeBSD at least, technically shouldn't it make no difference what root's default shell is? Since you get an enter path to your shell prompt with a default of /bin/sh for single user mode?
The only point I
personally could see to using anything but the root account, would be changing root and toor to dead-end accounts and using a randomly selected username as the real super user to keep people guessing. Which wouldn't make much sense because anyone who can look at /etc/password could find all super user accounts.
Code:
Terry@dixie$ grep -E '\w*:.*:0:0:.*' /etc/passwd 3:50
root:*:0:0:Charlie &:/root:/bin/csh
toor:*:0:0:Bourne-again Superuser:/root:
Terry@dixie$ 3:50