[CVALE] musical groups

[Patrick Bennett]

Okay, so I'm not just missing something in the man pages about how to 
specify a group as a member of another group then..... I was hoping I 
was just being impatient with the man pages or there was some 
under-documented way to do this built in to the group file syntax.  For 
example:

administrators:x:1000: joe,tina,admin
dialout:x:1001:jane,sam, at administrators

But no such luck, I take it.  Seems awfully obvious to me, but oh well.

Thanks!

    -Patrick


Dennis Baker wrote:
> usermod + parsing the group file plus your favorite scripting language 
> + a cron job every 5 minutes?
>
> grep admin /etc/group
>   parse the line pulling all users out
> usermod -name username dialout
>
> the part that's tricky is removing people from groups.  you can 
> certainly use usermod to remove them from the groups but if you remove 
> smeone from admin are they always removed from dialout or only when 
> they were added to dialout because they were in admin?  You would have 
> to keep that info separate. 
>
> It might just be easier to write a script that adds/ removes them. 
>
> grantadmin.sh
> #!/bin/bash
> usermod --name $1 -a admin,dialout
>
> unfortunately I don't know an easy way to drop someone from a group 
> with usermod.  The only thing I could figure is grab the groups they 
> are in, drop all groups and add the groups back in one at a time 
> eliminating the admin and dialout groups.
>
> The only way I've figured out to get a list of groups easily is either:
> grep username /etc/group
> then parse the result
>
> or
>
> sudo -u username groups
>
> the second result is cleaner but obviously requires sudo and privs.
>
> I'm not very good with shell scripting and generally lean on php or 
> python so I'm not even going to take a stab at a script to parse those 
> lines.  The first you could probably use sed and xargs.  The second is 
> maybe easier.
>
> Sorry... more a braindump than much help.
>
>
>
> On Jan 23, 2008 7:22 PM, Patrick Bennett <stnick at bennettbungalow.com 
> <mailto:stnick at bennettbungalow.com>> wrote:
>
>     Does anyone know if it is possible, and if so how to do so properly
>     either with the command line or editing the /etc/group file, to add
>     group A to group B such that all users of group A at any given moment
>     are also users of group B?
>
>     For example,  joe, tina, and admin belong to the group called
>     "administrators", while jane and sam are members of "dialout".  I want
>     jan and sam to remain members of "dialout", while adding all
>     members of
>     "administrators" to also be members of "dialout".  Furthermore, six
>     months from now when diego becomes a new "adminstrator" I want him to
>     automatically become a member of "dialout", and he will be replacing
>     joe, so when I remove joe from "adminsitrators" I want him to be
>     automatically removed from "dialout".
>
>     Thus, I want the group "administrators" to be a member of the group
>     "dialout".  Is this possible?  (I'm not interested in tricky gui tools
>     to do this for me.)
>
>        -Patrick
>
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>
> -- 
> Dennis Da-Ogre http://ogrehut.com
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