A question for all you UN*X experts

[Chuq Von Rospach]

[followups will be rerouted to only net.unix as the best place to continue
 this discussion]

In article <1762 at saber.UUCP> matt at saber.UUCP (Matt Perez) writes:
>>  
>> We have a question that maybe you can answer.  Does anyone out there know
>> of any utilities that use the information in /etc/group?  We keep our file
>> up to date, but have never noticed any system uses for this file.
>
>"ls -g" to display the file owner's group name.

I had expected someone to mention this by now, but since I haven't seen it,
4.2BSD Un*x added the capability to be in multiple groups at the same time,
based on the data in the /etc/group file. This means, for example, that you
could have your default group be "staff" in /etc/passwd, but also be in 
grous like "kernel" or "netnews" or whatever at the same time. This allows
you to use the group permissions on files and directories in a pretty
flexible way (finally) for allowing access to various development areas on
a single machine. This means that (in essence) any utility can use or
misused the information in /etc/group depending on how you want to set
things up...

chuq
access to
-- 
Chuq Von Rospach nsc!chuqui at decwrl.ARPA {decwrl,hplabs,ihnp4}!nsc!chuqui

Son, you're mixing ponderables again