I think Peter is unclear about the authority granted to a standard user, compared with the authority of the super user.
Peter, the
wheel group is just like any other group -- used for filesystem access control -- except that it one of the two factors for root user authorization access with su(1).
Let's look at the specific file where
wheel group access is defined:
/etc/group. According to group(5), group memberships are defined here.
Groups are used to define access controls to filesystems. And, for su(1), membership in the
wheel group is needed for root user access.
There are three layers of access control for any file, or any directory. user, group, and world. Let's look at one file, for example. /etc/group. Here's mine:
Code:
4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 1266 Jun 12 23:44 /etc/group
The "root wheel" tells me that the file is owned by the user
root, and assigned to the group
wheel.
The "-rw-r-r--" is the access granted to the user, to the assigned group, and to the world, which is all other users. The file is readable and writeable by the user
root, readable by other users who are in the group
wheel, and also readable by any other users on this system.
The root user is the superuser, and access to all files is granted to root regardless of ownership or group assignment.