Programming Perl, 4th Edition

getgrnam

getgrnam NAME

This function looks up a group file entry by group name. The return value in list context is:

#  0      1        2     3
($name, $passwd, $gid, $members) =
    getgrnam("wheel");

where $members contains a space-separated list of login names that are members of the group. If you want to do this repeatedly, consider caching the data in a hash using getgrent.

In scalar context, getgrnam returns only the numeric group ID. The User::grent module supports a by-name interface to this function. See getgrnam(3).