Birmingham mumbai

[
 58 
]
The following is sample output from this file on one of my servers:
Figure 2.10: Sample output from the /etc/group file
Like before, the columns in this file are separated by colons, though each line is only 
four columns long. In the first column, we have the name of the group. No surprise 
there. In the second, we are able to store a password for the group, but this is not 
used often as it's actually a security risk to do so. In the third column, we have the 
GID, which is similar in concept to the UID from when we were discussing users. 
Finally, in the last column, we (would) see a comma-separated list of each user that 
is a member of each of the groups. In this case, we're seeing that one user, 
jay
, is a 
member of the 
lxd
 group.
Several entries don't show any group memberships at all. Each user is indeed a 
member of their own group, so this is implied even though it doesn't explicitly call 
that out in this file. If you take a look at the 
/etc/passwd
 entries for your users, you 
will see that their primary group (shown as the third column in the form of a GID) 
references a group contained in the 
/etc/group
 file.
Creating new groups on your system is easy to do and is a great idea for categorizing 
your users and what they are able to do. Perhaps you can create an 
accounting
 
group for your accountants, an 
admins
 group for those in your IT department, and a 
sales
 group for your salespeople. The 
groupadd
 command allows you to create new 
groups. If you wanted to, you could just edit the 
/etc/group
 file and add a new line 
with your group information manually, although, in my opinion, using 
groupadd
 
saves you some work and ensures that group entries are created properly. Editing 
group and user files directly is typically frowned upon (and a typo can cause serious 
problems). Anyway, what follows is an example of creating a new group with the 
groupadd
 command:
sudo groupadd admins

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Chapter 2