On Thu, 2004-01-15 at 16:04, Jimmy Rosen wrote:
> I want users u1 and u2 to be members of groups g1 and g2.
> In /etc/group I'd like to use something like:
> g1::1234:u1,u2
> g2::12345:g1,u3,u4
> (users belonging to g1 should have access to g2 as well through inclusion 
> of g1 in g2 member list)
> But I haven't gotten this to work, eventhough I have seen/imagined such 
> behavior in some /etc/group files I've seen.
> Is this possible to do or have I just been dreaming?

You're dreaming. You can't nest groups, they can only contain users.

> Is there a good tool to simplify this "group reference" behavior? It's a 
> pain to add users to all group entries that they should have access to.

`groupadd`
`groupdel`
`groupmod`

Much better than editing /etc/group directly.

> When changing the /etc/group file it takes a while for the change to take 
> effekt. Is there some process I can sighup or something, or a tool to run 
> that reindexes the group info?

Group files don't get indexed, neither do they get re-read periodically.
They are read during the logon process.

> Changing group file and then running groups command, or trying things that 
> requires the changed permissions shows that the changes aren't used 
> immediately by themselves, so I assume they are cached somewhere.

Once you've added yourself to a group, logout and back in again for the
change to take effect. Alternatively, use `newgrp` to become a member of
the new group _for_the_current_shell_only_.

> A previous post to gentoo-user mentions pwconv and grpconv, but I haven't 
> seen any benifit to that, a relogin/reboot is still needed.

`pwconv` and `grpconv` are nothing to do with this. They toggle between
encrypted and plaintext group passwords. As you're not using group
passwords, this doesn't apply.

Hope that clarified a few points for you.

-- 
Kind regards

Greg Bolshaw
Consultant
Linux Technologies
http://www.linuxtechnologies.co.uk/

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