Re: exploring debian's users and groups
On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Joey Hess wrote:
> bin:
>
> HELP: No files on my system are owned by user or group bin. What
> good are they? Historically they were probably the owners of
> binaries in /bin? It is not mentioned in the FHS, debian
> policy, or the changelogs of base-passwd or base-files.
I can confirm that on Solaris 2.5, bin is the owner and group of most
files in /bin, /usr/bin, et al. I don't go back all that far in unix, so
I don't know why that is.
> sys:
>
> HELP: As with bin, except I don't even know what it was good for
> historically.
>
> I'm told that /dev/vcs* and /var/spool/cups are owned by
> group sys, dunno why.
On the same Solaris box, the sys group seems to be used similarly to adm,
but for some system programs rather than logs. The Sun package management
stuff all seems to be group sys, for example.
My OS X box has both groups, but I can't find where either of them are
used.
One thing that might be interesting to know is where the original passwd
and group files came from. If they were originally copied from some other
unix system early in Linux's history, that might explain why we've got
sys and bin: wherever they came from had sys and bin.
Or maybe not. :)
- Aaron
--
So: My point is that [Microsoft] may have a ton of money and be more
vicious than a junkyard dog, and have a stranglehold on dimwitted IS
managers, but they're just not very _competent_.
-- Rick Moen, on macosx-for-users
Reply to: