Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell

Managing Groups

Directory Services stores information about groups in its /groups directory. This is different from the /etc/group file, which is consulted only in single-user mode.

To list all of the group IDs (GIDs) and group names for the local domain, invoke nireport with the NetInfo domain (., the local domain), the directory (/groups), and the properties you want to inspect—in this case, gid and name:

    $ nireport . /groups gid name
    -2      nobody
    -1      nogroup
    0       wheel
    1       daemon
    2       kmem
    3       sys
    4       tty
    5       operator
    6       mail
    7       bin
    20      staff
    26      lp
    27      postfix
    28      postdrop
    29      certusers
    45      utmp
    66      uucp
    68      dialer
    69      network
    70      www
    74      mysql
    [... and so on ...]

Tip

Although the flat file format is called group (after the /etc/group file), the group directory is /groups. If you forget that last s, nireport looks for the wrong directory. However, if you want to dump the groups directory in the /etc/group file format, use the command nidump group . without that last s.