Groups?

Does there exist a document somewhere which discusses the
significance of the various groups that appear in /etc/group?
Specifically, I’d like to know the difference between
root, bin, daemon, sys and adm.

By the way, I love the very thorough discussion of
filesystem organization at http://www.pathname.com/fhs/

Norton Allen <allen@huarp.harvard.edu> wrote:

Does there exist a document somewhere which discusses the
significance of the various groups that appear in /etc/group?
Specifically, I’d like to know the difference between
root, bin, daemon, sys and adm.

A good quick talk about permissions is :
http://www.perlfect.com/articles/chmod.shtml

The idea of groups, isn’t so much in the name rather the
seperation of permissions. That said, if you belong to
the root group, you have very high/dangerous permissions.

-Adam
amallory@qnx.com

Operating System for Tech Supp wrote:

Norton Allen <> allen@huarp.harvard.edu> > wrote:
Does there exist a document somewhere which discusses the
significance of the various groups that appear in /etc/group?
Specifically, I’d like to know the difference between
root, bin, daemon, sys and adm.

A good quick talk about permissions is :
http://www.perlfect.com/articles/chmod.shtml

The idea of groups, isn’t so much in the name rather the
seperation of permissions. That said, if you belong to
the root group, you have very high/dangerous permissions.

Right, exactly. I understand groups. What I don’t understand
is the intended purposes for which the groups root, bin, daemon,
sys and adm were created. Which permissions are being separated?
If that isn’t made clear, then things tend to get muddled,
and everything gets accomplished via ‘su’.