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Date:      Fri, 31 May 1996 12:11:27 +0100
From:      "Gary Palmer" <gpalmer@FreeBSD.ORG>
To:        Kevin Lyda <kevin@NDA.COM>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freefall.freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: newgrp(1) 
Message-ID:  <8754.833541087@palmer.demon.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 31 May 1996 06:31:03 EDT." <199605311031.GAA05588@nda.nda.com> 

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[CC: List trimmed. People, please try to keep that in mind ... ]

Kevin Lyda wrote in message ID
<199605311031.GAA05588@nda.nda.com>:
> i'm not sure what this proves.  anyway, a newgrp command might be useful
> in terms of file creation.  if you had a group of users that all shared
> membership in group foo, a single newgrp at the start of the day
> would help avoid access denied issues.

Umm. Not really. You just do the work in a directory which is group
writable and owned byt he group, and the group (assuming your umask
is set right) will be able to work away to their hearts content.

E.g.:

gary@palmer:~> ls -algod .
drwxrwxr-x  22 gary  gary  - 1536 May 31 01:58 .
gary@palmer:~> touch test
gary@palmer:~> ls -algo test
-rw-rw-r--  1 gary  gary  - 0 May 31 12:02 test
gary@palmer:~> cd /home/group
gary@palmer:/home/group> ls -algod .
drwxrwxr-x  2 root  staff  - 512 May 31 12:02 .
gary@palmer:/home/group> touch work.c
gary@palmer:/home/group> ls -algo work.c
-rw-rw-r--  1 gary  staff  - 0 May 31 12:03 work.c
                    ^^^^^

So if other ``staff'' wanted to edit the file, they could. And they
would pick up the same group ownership from the directory that I
did...

It makes it a lot simpler than the Sys V model as you don't have to
remember to newgrp before switching to another project, you just `cd'
into the new work area and go.

Because of the different inheritance semantics between *BSD and SYS V,
I think a newgrp command would be basically useless without breaking a
lot of existing installations by changing the inheritance
system. Since we are NOT trying to be SYS V, we are trying to be a
stable system which doesn't go switching things around without good
reason, I don't think a move to SYS V semantics is likely...

Gary
--
Gary Palmer                                          FreeBSD Core Team Member
FreeBSD: Turning PC's into workstations. See http://www.FreeBSD.ORG/ for info



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