Groups, gshadow etc

[DislexiK]

Good day,

I have been researching a few things in regards to groups etc with Linux and having a hard time understanding the whole gpasswd/gshadow concepts, so I have a few questions:

1) We have the ability to be added to more than a single group, so why would you want to change your default group to a different group
2) Why password a group? I don't understand why someone would want to do this, is it so that you can give users the ability to add other users to a group, and to do this they need the password to add the user?
3) Whats with Admins and Members in the gshadow directory? Whats this all about?

I hope that someone can explain this to me, I have browsed google.com/linux however I couldn't find a good example/understand of the concepts.

Thanks for your help

DislexiK

[sarumont]

1) To change the default permissions when you create a file. I may want all files I create to be in wheel so no one else on my system can read them except wheel members. Then again, I may want all users to be able to read them. In a multi-user system, this can save you quite a few chowns.

2) If you don't want someone to be able to change his/her group id, you can password protect that group so that it cannot be changed to using newgrp without the password.

3) I don't really understand what you're saying here...there is no gshadow directory.

[DislexiK]

Hey thanks for the info, that makes a load of sense, in regards to 1) just to make sure I understand do you mean when you create a file/dir it creates it for your default group only, changing the default group allows you to create files/dirs for another group?

In regards to the second question answer from you, I don't understand that, can you give an example, because if they are part of a group, why should you password the group so they cannot set it as default?

I meant gshadow file , the admin and members part of it, don't get it, don't understand the diff parts, in group file it just has members of the group...

Thanks for the reply

DislexiK