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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