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(*) The system Administrator

On a large system serving hundreds of users, someone has to be given charge of administration of the system. 

This person is known as the system administrator.

The administrator is responsible for the management of the entire setup.

She allocates user accounts, maintains file systems, takes backups,manages disk space and performs several other important functions. She is the person to be contacted in case of a genuine problem.

If you own a workstation or PC that runs some flavor of UNIX, then you are probably its administrator . You are then directly responsible for its startup, shutdown and maintenance.

If you lose a file, it's your job to get it from a backup.

If things don't work properly, you have to try all possible means to set them right before you decide to call a maintenance person.

You can use a UNIX machine only after the administrator has opened an account with a user-id and password for your use.

These authentication parameters are maintained in two separate files on your system.

You can't simply sit down at any terminal and start banging away unless you first log on to the system using a valid user-id-password combination.

The administrator uses a special user-id to log on to the system : it is called ROOT. The root user has near-absolute powers; some programs can only be run from this account----for instance, the program that creates the user account itself.

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