Group Administration

In the last post I described about the the user administration. After user administration another task is to manage groups. 

To see the present groups in your system you can type groups command. The /etc/group maintains the group membership information. You create groups and add users to a group using both GUI tool and Command line, but I will suggest you to use command line because it is fast and easy. Once you have been familiar with the command line you will enjoy using it the most.

To create new group you can edit /etc/group file or you can run the following command:

• groupadd group_name : this will add a group named group_name in /etc/group.
• groupdel group_name : this will delete a group named group_name in /etc/group.
• groupmod : modifies group members.
• chgrp : to change group permissions.

GROUP ADMINISTRATION

 To add users named donna to a group named sales you can run the following command:

• usermod -G sales donna : this command will add user donna to the group sales.

OR

• You can add user donna directly to the /etc/group 
• sales:x:503:donna

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To add a user to a group at the time of creation of user, you can type the following command:

• useradd -G sales mike : this command will make a user mike and add it to the sales group.

You can also use Graphical User Interface for user and group administration.

To open the USER and GROUP GUI run system-config-users at the command line or

• Go to System-->Administration-->Users and Groups.

You can do a lot with users and groups like provide special privileges to specific users or groups and also can do the group collaboration. We will discuss these topics in the next post.