May 15, 2003

wheel

n.

[from slang ‘big wheel’ for a powerful person] A person who has an active wheel bit. We need to find a wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives. (See wedged, sense 1.) The traditional name of security group zero in BSD (to which the major system-internal users like root belong) is ‘wheel’. Some vendors have expanded on this usage, modifying Unix so that only members of group ‘wheel’ can go root.

Posted by Jargon File at May 15, 2003 10:23 AM

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