Re: Changing groups
On Thu, 2003-08-14 at 15:35, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 03:13:47PM -0400, Dan Jones wrote:
> > On Thu, 2003-08-14 at 07:44, Colin Watson wrote:
> > > On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 06:54:34AM -0400, Dan Jones wrote:
> > > > Is there no way to change your group under a GUI? Executing newgrp
> > > > under a terminal only affects that session, not the parent GUI process.
> > >
> > > You have to log out and back in again, I'm afraid.
> > >
> > > > If I set up groups and give them access to various files, can I only
> > > > access those files from a command line? Doesn't that defeat much of the
> > > > usefulness of having groups in the first place?
> > >
> > > Not really; on the average Unix system, groups aren't usually so
> > > rapidly-changing that the need to restart processes in order to acquire
> > > them is a major problem.
> >
> > Average Unix systems don't exercise selective control of files by
> > users?
>
> Of course they do. Group memberships don't need to change once a minute
> for that to work, though.
>
> > If I want to make certain files only viewable or writable by
> > certain users, how do I do that other than by groups?
> By groups. Logging out and back in isn't *that* onerous, though.
I wouldn't call it onerous, no. I would call it cumbersome, though.
> > For example, say I supervise several teams working on a project. Each
> > person should have access to only the project directories of their
> > teams. However, some people are on more than one team. And as
> > supervisor, I'm a member of them all. I have exactly this situation at
> > work and cant' believe that my requirements are that unusual. At work,
> > however, we're Microserfs and setting the requisite access privileges is
> > trivial under NTFS. I'm trying to set up a similar situation on my home
> > LAN (a mixture of MS and Mandrake desktops with Debian servers) and
> > finding it difficult to do.
>
> What's the problem other than having to log out and back in (or
> launching graphical programs from a newgrped shell if that's impractical
> just at the moment)? I'm in lots of groups on all kinds of systems and
> don't find this onerous at all. The last time I got added to an
> additional group on debian.org machines was back in April, for example.
>
> Do you really create new projects more often than, say, once every
> couple of days?
Do I CREATE new projects that often? No. However, I ACCESS different
projects quite frequently, including having files from several different
projects open at the same time. I'm comfortable at the command line, so
I'll simply get used to using it more often. It just surprises me that
Linux doesn't have a way to handle this more gracefully. Hmm, wonder how
big a patch it would be to convert Linux to the BSD way of doing
things? (Under BSD, all of your groups are always active.) Anyway,
thanks for your comments.
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