Hands-On Linux Administration on Azure

Group management

A user is always a member of one group, the primary group, that is—as discussed in a previous paragraph—defined in the passwd database.

Besides being a member of a primary group, additional group memberships can be added. This can be necessary to get access to a group directory/share or to delegate privileges in the sudo configuration. You can add existing additional groups with the --groups parameter of the useradd command during the creation of a user or afterwards with usermod or groupmems.

Let's create a new user and a new group and verify the results:

sudo useradd studentsudo passwd studentsudo getent passwd studentsudo groupadd staffsudo getent group staff

Make the user student a member of the group staff:

sudo groupmems ...