When a new file is created, the file isn’t just assigned an owner. It’s also assigned a group.
The best way to think about groups is as collections of users. For example, sales might be the collection of the users who work in the sales department, and prod might be the group of people who work in the production department. All the managers in a company might belong to a group called mgrs. And on most systems, a special group, wheel, is assigned to users who can perform some system administration tasks.
On many UNIX systems, each user can belong to more than one group. The manager of the sales department would belong to both the sales and mgrs group. On some systems, each user belongs to all his or her groups at all times. On other systems, you only belong to one group at a time and must explicitly change groups whenever you want to switch your membership.
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