Below are the findings of an idiot, if they help you great, if not that's what you get for listening to an idiot. Just for sh%ts and giggles I tried this on my Mandrake 8.1 box, it works there too. Looks like halt (/usr/bin/halt) is acutally a link to something called consolehelper that has 755 perms. Consolehelper looks like a jack of all trades in that lots of stuff points to it. halt userdrake shutdown rpminst rpmdrake poweroff Mandrakeupdate logview Looks like consolehelper is there to let regular users run all kinds of stuff as root, stuff like rpminst and userdrake will prompt you for a root password, other stuff like halt will not. Just a way to keep you from having to log in as root I guess. If it really bugs you I suppose you could set the perms on consolehelper to 700 (root owns it) but I have no idea what other stuff it may break. Jimmy Jam wrote: > Hi All, > > My RdHat 7.2 allows me to halt the system (using the halt command) as an ordinary (non root) user. Does anyone know why. I would think this is vry dangerous. > > -- It is much easier to be critical than correct. - Benjamin Disraeli