Users, groups and directory access

[Jeff Vian]

A.J. Bonnema wrote:

> Matthew Miller wrote:
>
>> On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 03:30:07AM -0500, David L Norris wrote:
>>
>>> # root can change john's group membership like this
>>> usermod -G proj john
>>
>>
>>
>> This is bad because it *replaces* the current list of groups. If john 
>> was
>> previously a member of 'staff' or 'proj2', that would be removed. 
>> This is
>> why gpasswd -a is usually better.
>>
>>
>
> Thanks for allerting me to this detail!
>
> Yes, well I can confirm, although it doesn't work as I expected after 
> reading the man-page.
>
> The primary group is never deleted (the man-page only mentions that 
> groups not listed will be deleted, which appears not to be true for 
> the primary group.
>
> If you add the primary group using 'usermod -G' then all secondary 
> groups are deleted from this user.
> If you add a secondary group, that is new to this user, the old 
> secondary groups are all deleted (from this user). The primary group 
> remains in effect.

If the utilities are not working as you want, just edit the /etc/group 
file and manually make the changes.
Fall back to the old standby editor and the way it used to be done.

>
> Guus.