Mastering Ubuntu Server - Second Edition

Managing groups

Now that we understand how to create, manage, and switch between user accounts, we'll need to understand how to manage groups as well. The concept of groups in Linux is not very different from other platforms and pretty much serves the exact same purpose. With groups, you can more efficiently control a user's access to resources on your server. By assigning a group to a resource (a file, directory, and so on), you can allow and disallow access to users by simply adding them or removing them from the group.

The way this works in Linux is that every file or directory has both a user and a group that takes ownership of it. This is contrary to platforms such as Windows, which can have multiple groups assigned to a single resource. ...