Managing Groups
Directory
Services stores information about groups in its
/groups
directory. This is different from the
/etc/group
file, which is consulted only in
single-user mode.
To list all of the group IDs (GIDs) and
group names for the local domain, invoke
nireport
with the NetInfo domain
(.
, the local domain), the directory
(/groups
), and the properties you want to
inspect—in this case, gid
and
name
:
$ nireport . /groups gid name
-2 nobody
-1 nogroup
0 wheel
1 daemon
2 kmem
3 sys
4 tty
5 operator
6 mail
7 bin
20 staff
25 smmsp
26 lp
27 postfix
28 postdrop
31 guest
45 utmp
66 uucp
68 dialer
69 network
70 www
74 mysql
75 sshd
76 qtss
78 mailman
79 appserverusr
80 admin
81 appserveradm
99 unknown
Tip
Although the flat file format is called
group
(after the /etc/group
file), the group directory is /groups
. If you
forget that last s
,
nireport
will look for the wrong directory.
However, if you want to dump the groups directory in the
/etc/group
file format, use the command
nidump group
.
without that last s
.
Creating a Group with niload
The niload
utility can be used to read the flat-file
format used by /etc/group
(name:password:gid:members
). To add a new group,
you can create a file that adheres to that format and load it with
niload
. For ad hoc work, you can use a
here
document (an expression that
functions as a quoted string, but spans multiple lines) rather than a
separate file:
$sudo niload group . <<EOF
>writers:*:1001:
>EOF
Creating a Group with dscl
To create a ...
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