Solaris™ Operating Environment Boot Camp By David Rhodes, Dominic Butler
Table of Contents
Chapter 3. User Administration
The system uses a number of mechanisms to make sure that users' files are protected from everyone else. Gathering related users together into "groups" is one of these mechanisms. This allows users to easily share any common resources, and it also provides an opportunity to control file access on a group basis. We'll look at user and group permissions in more detail in Chapter 4, "Permissions and All That."
To ensure this mechanism works, each user must be a member of at least one group, which is known as the user's primary group. In addition, users can also be members of a number of other groups, known as their secondary groups.
Using secondary groups provides a degree of flexibility for the user. For example, assume your primary group is set to engineering and you require access to files owned by the sales and marketing groups. Setting your secondary group membership to sales and marketing would quickly solve this problem. We'll look at this in more detail in "Primary and Secondary Groups" on page 46.
