On Wed, Sep 15, 2004 at 04:15:18PM +0100, Nick Pierpoint wrote: > > How do I add "john" to the group called "users" > I believe usermod is the command you're after. > To put "john" in the "users" group: > usermod -g users john Eep, don't do this. It's an easy mistake to make, because it seems intuitively like the thing you want to do. However, there's a problem: you're not adding the user to the group, you're changing his primary group (the one listed in the /etc/passwd file). This'll remove him from any existing group there. So, you might think, okay, I'll use the usermod -G option instead -- that works for supplementary groups (the ones in /etc/group). But there's a problem with that too -- it can't actually add to the current list, just _completely replace_ the groups the user is a member of. So you'd need to list on the command line each group you want john to still be a part of -- "usermod -G john,users,staff,websrv,whatever". That's usually not what you want to do. Luckily, there's a solution -- the oddly-named command "gpasswd" does exactly the right thing. (It also has some less-used features dealing with group passwords -- hence the name.) So: gpasswd users -a john and you're all set. -- Matthew Miller mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx <http://www.mattdm.org/> Boston University Linux ------> <http://linux.bu.edu/>
