Can someone tell me what Wheel is under sharing and permissions in the get info of textedit.app? Who is wheel? I see system, everyone, and wheel
Here is a screenshot of what I mean.
iMac (2017 – 2020)
“wheel” is short for “Big Wheel”. See:
https://crossidiomas.com/big-wheel
“…Over time, the term “big wheel” began to take on a metaphorical meaning as well. As people observed how those in charge often had control over important resources like money or machinery, they started using the phrase to refer to anyone with significant power or influence…”
The “wheel” group has been around from the early days of the UNIX operating system.
In the early days of UNIX, it was not used on a personal use computer. Computers were expensive, and shared among lots of users. There were administrators and computer operators (doing backups, change tapes on magtape drives, put paper in the line printer, etc…).
A users which was made part of the “wheel” group was allowed to manipulate files owned by the “wheel” group, or execute commands owned by the “wheel” group, but did not grant execute access to users not part of the “wheel” group.
This restricting access to specific operating system functions became very important when UNIX started being used in colleges and universities, where students would look for ways to exploit holes in the system to gain extra resources, or do malicious things.
With the advent of personal computers, some of the earlier practices live on for historical reasons, but make less sense.
