Special Edition Using® Solaris™ 9

Managing Groups

A group is a collection of users who share files and other system resources or users who are assigned similar responsibilities. Groups are useful in situations where you require many users to access a set of files and directories. For example, you can place all the files related to a project named “Net2Asia” in a directory and assign all the project team members who require access to that directory to a group. Therefore, it becomes easier to assign access permissions to a group related to a specific directory. This prevents access to the directory by non-members of the group.

Each group has a name, a GID, and a list of users who belong to that group. A GID is a unique number that identifies the group internally on a system. A ...