[9fans] Newbie question: groups

[9fans] Newbie question: groups

[Keith Nash]

How does the group leader add or remove a group member?

Re: [9fans] Newbie question: groups

[Russ Cox]

> How does the group leader add or remove a group member?

he types commands at the console.
where does it still say that?
i thought we'd gotten rid of that lie
in the documentation.

Re: [9fans] Newbie question: groups

[Keith Nash]

>> How does the group leader add or remove a group member?

>he types commands at the console.
>where does it still say that?
>i thought we'd gotten rid of that lie
>in the documentation.

It's in the (admittedly rather old) first article in Vol 2 of the manual.  No wonder I couldn't find out how to do it from Vol 1!

I assume then that only adm can change group membership, by editing /adm/users at the fileserver console.

Giving group leaders the right to manage membership of their groups would actually be a very useful feature: Lunix people moan that user/group/world is too coarse-grained, and they want ACLs as well.  But user/group/world *and* ACLs reminds me too much of VMS permissions hell.

I rather like treating the group as the ACL: and the idea of a group leader, who can add or remove group members, makes it easy to provide fine-grained access this way.  Better still if a user can also create a group (without creating a new user with the same name).

Keith.

Re: [9fans] Newbie question: groups

[Russ Cox]

> I assume then that only adm can change group
> membership, by editing /adm/users at the fileserver console.

Actually we typically use the newuser command in fs(8)
or the uname command in fossilcons(8), rather than
edit /adm/users directly.

Re: [9fans] Newbie question: groups

[rob pike, esq.]

> Actually we typically use the newuser command in fs(8)
> or the uname command in fossilcons(8), rather than
> edit /adm/users directly.

One important point is that the kernel knows nothing about this stuff.
If you wanted to provide an adminstrative interface to the file system
that doesn't involve typing on the console, go for it; it can all be done
in the file system itself.

-rob