From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Jul 7 10:49:25 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id KAA26801 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 7 Jul 1997 10:49:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phoenix.its.rpi.edu (dec@phoenix.its.rpi.edu [128.113.161.45]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA26796 for ; Mon, 7 Jul 1997 10:49:21 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (dec@localhost) by phoenix.its.rpi.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id NAA11866; Mon, 7 Jul 1997 13:49:04 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 7 Jul 1997 13:49:04 -0400 (EDT) From: "David E. Cross" To: Tony Holmes cc: FreeBSD hackers list Subject: Re: uid > 32000 In-Reply-To: <199707071557.LAA01700@bitter.zeus.leitch.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Mon, 7 Jul 1997, Tony Holmes wrote: > Hello, > > I've been pouring through any document I can get my hands onto and > can't find if there is any significance to a user id that is greater > than 32000. > > There are a couple of user id's in our system defined in the 64000 > range (notably the nobody user) and I was wondering if this infers > additional/reduced priviledges. > > If anyone could answer this question or point out documentation for > this, I would greatly appreciate it. > It generall does not mean anything with modern unices. In the 'old' days UID was a signed 16bit integer, which limited you to 32767 different userids. Userids > 32767 were really negative numbers. The definition in has the UID as an unsigned int (32 bits), giving 2.1 billion different possibilities. Other than that, it is just a number for the computer to use to track who owns what, there is nothing 'special' about it. (the only special uid/gid is '0'). -- David Cross