kk, I am guilty of easily just booting up in Kde's gui, start/system settings/users and groups but then also I'd rather do it from the bash console. after googling around a good bit I am still not exactly sure of the proper way to do this. I want to add a user to another group w/out removing the groups the user already belongs to. in man usermod: -G group,[...] A list of supplementary groups which the user is also a member of. Each group is separated from the next by a comma, with no intervening whitespace. The groups are subject to the same restrictions as the group given with the -g option. If the user is currently a member of a group which is not listed, the user will be removed from the group. This behaviour can be changed via -a option, which appends user to the current supplementary group list. ok...I kinda get this but unclear of the exact format and I am super fearful of ripping up my userbase. Here is what I think it should be: # usermod <user> -a -G <group> where the user's name is say..."pete" and I want him to be added to the group "tech": # usermod pete -a -G tech Say pete is already in groups ummm, sales,admin, and help. After administering the above command, would pete still be in sales, admin,help, and now tech? I am interested in the simplest, correct way to do this. thx, John Rose