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  • When you say "root equivalent" account, what do you mean, exactly? Commented Mar 6, 2016 at 4:35
  • another account with uid=0 - e.g. on freebsd it's standard to have the root account (uid=0) AND a toor account (also uid=0, but with sh or bash rather than tcsh as its shell). both accounts are root, because the kernel cares only about the uid, not the name. there's nothing (except sanity and restraint :) stopping you from having as many such root accounts as you like. BTW, this is not a loophole around the common warning "don't login as root", uid 0 is root no matter what login name it happens to have. Commented Mar 6, 2016 at 6:38
  • What's this about a “root equivalent account”? If it has UID 0, it's root, no matter how it's called in /etc/passwd. If this user is running the rsync commands, then root is running the rsync commands, and having an extra line in /etc/passwd is pointless. Commented Mar 6, 2016 at 16:05
  • Also, ssh commands like rsync or scp won't work if the user's shell is /sbin/nologin. Commented Jul 19, 2021 at 1:28