[PLUG] chown issue

Dick Steffens dick at dicksteffens.com
Sun Jan 6 22:00:38 UTC 2019


On 1/6/19 9:21 AM, Ben Koenig wrote:
> old school unix philosophy is focused on multiuser mainframes. For this
> reason, the more basic utilities such as 'adduser' do not create a group
> for a new user.
>
> All users are part of the "users" group. For desktop system that emulate
> the way mac and windows handle file ownership, the user creation tool will
> create a group named after the user, specific to that user.
>
> DESKTOP distros (like ubuntu) do things a little bit differently. It's an
> odd quirk between server and desktop use cases.
> So in general, a linux desktop utility that creates users will
> 1) create user rsteff
> 2) create group named after new user (rsteff)
> 3) add rsteff to group rsteff
> 4) assign rsteff the next available UID after 1000 (first user is UID 1000)
>
> That is how most graphical user management tools do it. On Slackware people
> get opinionated about which tool you should use, so I'll just lay out the
> options for creating a new user.
>
> adduser:
> command line utility that creates a user, profile, and adds groups for
> basic functionality
> - DOES NOT create a dedicated group for that user.
> - defaults to next available UID
>
> KUser:
> graphical tool in KDE for user management.
> Can create, delete, and modify user accounts in a graphical interface. This
> interface provides very similar functionality to the gnome user management
> in Ubuntu.
> - DOES create a dedicated group for that user (for user rsteff, group
> rsteff is automatically created and user rsteff added to it)
> - User ID's start at 1000, and climb from there.
>
> Contrary to popular belief, there is no correct way to define user groups
> and ID's. Pick a tool and stick with it, the only mistake would be to
> randomly bounce from one tool to the next.
> Personally, I use KUser. I like having my user IDs start at 1000 and having
> a group for each user makes things simpler when interacting with other
> distros.

Okay. Pick one way and stick with it. I'm not likely to ever create 
another user (like rsteff), and as long as I know I'm a member of the 
group users, and can do chown with rsteff:users, then I'm okay with 
that. I assume there may be other times a user gets created, and now I 
know what to look out for if that comes up.

Thanks.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens




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