On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 03:30:07AM -0500, David L Norris wrote:
# root can change john's group membership like this usermod -G proj john
This is bad because it *replaces* the current list of groups. If john was previously a member of 'staff' or 'proj2', that would be removed. This is why gpasswd -a is usually better.
Thanks for allerting me to this detail!
Yes, well I can confirm, although it doesn't work as I expected after reading the man-page.
The primary group is never deleted (the man-page only mentions that groups not listed will be deleted, which appears not to be true for the primary group.
If you add the primary group using 'usermod -G' then all secondary groups are deleted from this user.
If you add a secondary group, that is new to this user, the old secondary groups are all deleted (from this user). The primary group remains in effect.
Guus. -- A.J. Bonnema, Leiden The Netherlands, user #328198 (Linux Counter http://counter.li.org)
