On 15:13 01 Feb 2003, Listman <mylists@shoesobjects.com> wrote: | When I create a new user, by default the user belongs to a group of the same | name. Why is this? It seems to me that having a group for every single | user is overkill. Id like to have all users belong to a 'users' group and | then more priviledged users belong to an 'admin type group'. It's not overkill for mid to large size organisations. I'll be moving my workplace to this scheme once a certain showstopper braindead legacy app is gone. The advantage of the per-user matching group is that it makes group collaboration very easy. When you work with others, sharing files, you often have a shared area (the "project" directory at my workplace) where the files are group owned by a group for the project and the setgid bit is on all the directories so new files acquire that group for sharing purposes. Naturally, doing group work one's umask should be 007 or 002 (depending on security environment - we do 002 at work). _BUT_, how to ensure that personal files (made elsewhere, eg your $HOME dir) are private by default, and _without_ just putting 700 mode on $HOME, because we have a fairly open culture at work. It would be nice to not have to remember to hack your umask when switching to/from group work. And thus the per-user group. If my umask is 007, and I work in the group area then group access is fine for them. If I do that in $HOME, then - with an (empty) per-user group my files are private because I'm the only member of the group - without such (eg with a "users" group) if one forgets to close the umask back down to 027 or 077 then my files are WIDE OPEN to everyone in the "users" group, usually NOT what I want | My question is, can I delete the user groups that have the same name us | users? Thanks in advance. Yep. Adjust the users' primary groups to match of course. But don't bother. It costs you nothing to have these groups and may one day benefit you. Cheers, -- Cameron Simpson, DoD#743 cs@zip.com.au http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/ Dawn, V8, miles, breakfast, miles, gas, miles, miles, gas, miles, miles, milkshake, miles, shop, miles, park, M and G, happy hour, freeze-dried dinner, journals, bunk, dawn, miles, miles, ... Bruce W. Robinson <BRUCE_W_ROBINSON@CCM.JF.INTEL.COM> -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
