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GROUP(5) BSD File Formats Manual GROUP(5) NAME group -- format of the group permissions file DESCRIPTION The file </etc/group> consists of newline separated ASCII records, one per group, containing four colon `:' separated fields. These fields are as follows: group Name of the group. passwd Group's encrypted password. gid The group's decimal ID. member Group members. Lines whose first non-whitespace character is a pound-sign (#) are com- ments, and are ignored. Blank lines that consist only of spaces, tabs or newlines are also ignored. The group field is the group name used for granting file access to users who are members of the group. The gid field is the number associated with the group name. They should both be unique across the system (and often across a group of systems) since they control file access. The passwd field is an optional encrypted password. This field is rarely used and an asterisk is normally placed in it rather than leaving it blank. The member field contains the names of users granted the privi- leges of group. The member names are separated by commas without spaces or newlines. A user is automatically in a group if that group was speci- fied in their /etc/passwd entry and does not need to be added to that group in the /etc/group file. YP/NIS INTERACTION The /etc/group file can be configured to enable the YP/NIS group data- base. An entry whose name field consists of a plus sign (`+') followed by a group name, will be replaced internally to the C library with the YP/NIS group entry for the named group. An entry whose name field con- sists of a single plus sign with no group name following, will be re- placed with the entire YP/NIS "group.byname" map. If the YP/NIS group database is enabled for any reason, all reverse lookups (i.e., getgrgid()) will use the entire database, even if only a few groups are enabled. Thus, the group name returned by getgrgid() is not guaranteed to have a valid forward mapping. LIMITS There are various limitations which are explained in the function where they occur; see section SEE ALSO. In older implementations, a group cannot have more than 200 members. The maximum line length of /etc/group is 1024 characters. Longer lines will be skipped. This limitation disappeared in FreeBSD 3.0. Older binaries that are statically linked, depend on old shared libraries, or non-FreeBSD binaries in compatibility mode may still have this limits. FILES /etc/group SEE ALSO passwd(1), setgroups(2), crypt(3), getgrent(3), initgroups(3), passwd(5), yp(8) BUGS The passwd(1) command does not change the group passwords. HISTORY A group file format appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX. The YP/NIS func- tionality is modeled after SunOS and first appeared in FreeBSD 1.1. Sup- port for comments first appeared in FreeBSD 3.0. BSD September 29, 1994 BSD
NAME | DESCRIPTION | YP/NIS INTERACTION | LIMITS | FILES | SEE ALSO | BUGS | HISTORY
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