Sounds like Slackware set squid up to run under the user "nobody". To make it run under the user "squid" you would have to create the "squid" username and it's home directory would be the same as the cache directory, on my system the /etc/passwd entry looks like this:
Notice the login shell is "/dev/null", this insures that no one can log in as that user, however you want to also set the passwd field in /etc/shadow to "!!" like this:
I usually create a user normally and then go change those few things manually with vim but there should be options to the "adduser" or "useradd" command to create them that way from the start. Here's the useradd equivelant that you would want to use:
# adduser -M -d /var/lib/squid -s /dev/null
and then go edit the /etc/shadow and make sure the second field is "!!" (or just type "passwd -l squid" which will do the same thing).
[ December 06, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]