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A comment on Where did the wheel group get its name?. Parent comment

Re:Where did the wheel group get its name? by slededit on Friday June 01, 2018 @03:28PM (#17209113)
The root user is the root of the permission tree. All power comes from and can be taken back by the root user. Everyone else has less power.

The first program was also traditionally executed under a root user. You can see this carry forward with init scripts running as root by default.

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Re:Where did the wheel group get its name? by gowld on Friday June 01, 2018 @05:49PM (#17210715)
Root runs the root process. Processes form a tree.

There are no root "permissions", because permissions are not a tree structure. Users can't give permissions to other users, recursively.

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Re:Where did the wheel group get its name? by slededit on Friday June 01, 2018 @09:13PM (#17211998)
They can in the temporal sense, the tree isn't tracked by software but it still originates that way. As the first account root creates the second and may decide to delegate other permissions. Given sufficient permission that account may too decide to create others and so on. If root rescinds permissions its not recursive which I think is what you are getting at.
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