On Unix-like systems, a special user account used for system administration.
root is the conventional name of the powerful user with id 0 on Unix-like systems unix such as Linux linux. Many administrative commands and system calls are reserved to root.
Use rooted-device if your question is not about the user, but simply about a device that has been rooted.
Root is a system user. It is rare to log in directly as root, but rather, users who are privileged enough gain root access for one command with sudo sudo, or log into a temporary root shell with su su.
In the world of android (which runs on an Linux kernel), a rooted device is one where OS protections have been disabled, allowing processes to run as root, and thus do things they would normally be prevented from doing, such as reading all files on the device.
Not to be confused with CERN's ROOT framework for statistical analysis in C++, see root-framework.
See also:
