FreeBSD Handbook
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# 13.4 System Accounts

System users are those used to run services such as DNS, mail, web servers, and so forth. The reason for this is security; if all services ran as the superuser, they could act without restriction.

Examples of system users are `daemon`, `operator`, `bind` (for the Domain Name Service), `news`, and `www`.

`nobody` is the generic unprivileged system user. However, it is important to keep in mind that the more services that use `nobody`, the more files and processes that user will become associated with, and hence the more privileged that user becomes.

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