Re: group- ?

["Monique Y. Herman" <spam@bounceswoosh.org>]

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 at 21:53 GMT, Paul Morgan penned:
> On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 10:46:20 -0700, Monique Y. Herman wrote:
> 
>> So, in /etc, there are group and group-, which seem to be identical
>> except that group- has much more restrictive permissions.
>> 
>> What's group- for?  What happens if I edit /etc/group directly and
>> don't copy the changes over to group- right away?
> 
> I believe that group- is the minus 1 version of group.
> 
> If you have shadowing installed, which you probably have, then you
> should use groupadd, groupdel and groupmod to manipulate groups (you
> need to get your changes into gshadow as well as group).


I've never used group passwords, but I wouldn't think that adding a user
to a group would affect the shadow files?  I guess I need to read up on
this stuff a bit.

By the way, below is a description of the problem that prompted this
inquiry:

I ran 'usermod -G' last night and couldn't figure out why I apparently
lost several of my groups.  Turns out, of course, that -G doesn't
append, it replaces.

Mystery solved.  

-- 
monique