|
|
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.
|
|
