[CentOS] /etc/group file entries

Mon Mar 8 21:08:16 UTC 2010
Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com>

On Mon, 2010-03-08 at 12:48 -0800, Bill Campbell wrote:
> Looking at the documentation of the /etc/group file including
> some google searches, it appears to me that, contrary to the man
> pages for group, Linux systems generally do not put membership
> user names for the user's primary group in the record for it in
> the /etc/group file, only for secondary groups.  FreeBSD seems to
> do the same thing while SCO OpenServer has full entries for the
> primary group as well as secondaries.
> 
> Is there a best practice when manipulating these regarding line
> length?  I've see articles that recommend splitting long entries
> into multiple group lines with the same group id, while at least
> some SuSE Linux Enterprise systems produce single long lines
> (30,869 characters on a site with about 5,100 accounts).
> 
> How would the system's group maintenance routines interact with a
> group file where this was done?
----
the 'best practice' in my view is to use LDAP and forget about huge flat
file users/groups?

Craig


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