On Wed, 28 Mar 2007 15:14:18 -0700
"Fargusson.Alan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I have been watching this discussion and I just realized that it is a bit 
> silly.  If you are root you have access to everything, so you don't need any 
> groups.

Except when dealing with NFS, external security models and/or SELinux
rules that disagree.

Groups are set at login time and inherited by the process tree exactly
like many other properties. You can create a sub-session with different
group setups using "newgrp". Handy if there are just too many groups you
need to be in, or to set the group used for file creation.


For the limit see the NGROUPS define or on modern systems (its oddly not
itself in POSIX) sysconf(_SC_NGROUPS_MAX) - 32 for Linux but only 8 (I
think its 8 anyway) are supported by NFS and other RPC services with unix
auth.

Alan

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