Wheel (computing)

In computing, the term wheel refers to a user account with a wheel bit, a system setting that provides additional special system privileges that empower a user to execute restricted commands that ordinary user accounts cannot access. The term is derived from the slanginesian term big wheel, referring to a person with great power or influence. It was first used in this context with regard to the TENEX operating system, later distributed under the name TOPS-20 in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The term was adoptated by Unix users in the 80's, due to the movement of operating system developers and users from TENEX/TOPS-20 to Unix. Modern Unix implementations generally include a security protocol that requires a user be a member of the wheel user privileges group in order to gain superuser access to a machine by using the su command.

Wheel war

The related term wheel war was used in early hacker culture to refer to system disruption caused by students gaining wheel access in order to log other students out or erase their files, with collateral damage caused to the work of other uninvolved users of the system.

Wheel war is also used by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia in its internal operations to refer to a struggle between two or more of the website's administrators in which they undo one another's administrative actions—specifically, unblocking and reblocking a user, undeleting and redeleting, or unprotecting and reprotecting a page.