Wheel war

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For the policy against wheel warring on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Wheel war.

A wheel war is a contest between privileged users on a shared, on-line computer system, in which each user discovers or invents ways to interfere with others' use of the system. Though generally done as a practical joke or a way of blowing off some steam, such warring can also be the result of serious administrative disagreements.

[edit] Origin of term

The term originates in the TENEX operating system, which became more widely distributed under the name TOPS-20 in the 1960s and early 1970s: WHEEL describes a level of user capabilities greater than that of OPERATOR. The name was most likely chosen because a wheel was among the earliest tools for getting things done, and "big wheel" denoted an important person in the vernacular.^[1]

Because of the movement of operating system developers and users from TENEX/TOPS-20 to Unix, the term was likewise adopted by the Unix community. In many Unix systems, the su command could be used to gain superuser access to a machine. Fearing misuse, some system administrators only allowed users in a certain group to use su; this group was frequently referred to as "wheel", which similarly indicated a level of trust greater than that of a system operator.

GNU su does not support "wheel", primarily for philosophical reasons. ^[2]