fun w/ /etc/group and friends

[Mike Pfleger <pfleger@pfleger-precision.com>]

Hello all.

First; let me say thanks to Eduard Bloch for the clarification on my
Woody install problems.  I installed a Potato base, and upgraded.  Not
graceful, I suppose, but it did the trick :)

Today's questions are all about group, group-, and /etc/group.org, those
fun little files that live in /etc.  I checked the archives, but came up
with nothing useful.

First question:  Why are there three of these files?  I thought there
should only be /etc/group. (?)

The next question is a bit more involved, perhaps:
Can we nest groups in Debian or in GNU/Linux in general?
-My guess would be "yes" but my experimentation is pretty much
indicating "no".

I've added my unpriv'd user accounts to the group "staff".  Then I put
"staff" into the group "audio", with the hope that the unpriv'd users
would now have audio access.  Typing "groups" as any of those unpriv'd
accounts yielded:
	staff
and nothing else.  This would indicate to me that nesting does not work
in GNU/Linux, or at least in my vanilla Woody config.  Could someone
please shed some light on this?  I logged out and back in, btw, which
should have forced the change (or am I mistaken?).

All mods (done in vim, btw) had been replicated to all three (see above)
variations of /etc/group*, in case anyone was wondering.  My config
currently has this user account explicitly added to audio and dip (and
what is that group for, btw?), so I have audio currently working for
this acct.

Thanks in advance!
Mike Pfleger
pfleger@pfleger-precision.com
(250) 479-0321


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