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Is it possible for a user to belong to a group in Linux but that the group name is not listed in the group file in /etc directory. If so, what are some examples?

3 Answers 3

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  1. It is possible that there are alternative locations for group definitions, as specified in nsswitch.conf:

    • NIS

    • LDAP

    • Berkeley DB files, instead of flat files

    • ... and any number of alternative methods that may or may not be available as additional NSS modules in a system.

  2. It is possible that a filesystem object belongs to a UID or a GID that has not been defined in /etc/passwd, /etc/groups or via any alternative name service. As far as the kernel is concerned, that is perfectly acceptable, since it's the userspace that provides the mapping to human-readable names anyway. In that case, userspace tools will typically display the numeric ID instead of a name.

    On the other hand, while entirely possible, having objects with an invalid UID or GID is usually an indication for a problem of some significance - quite often it will be a user that has been removed without proper handling for their files. Such a situation is not acceptable in most cases, because it allows for the possibility of an information leak should the UID/GID in question be reused for a new user/group who would now find themselves owning a number of files from a past user...

We might be able to help more if you mentioned your actual issue...

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It is possible to have a file that has a GID that isn't listed in groups, this quite often happens if you import files (e.g. tar-balls) from another machine. The group is then shown by ls and such as a number, e.g. 4000. For example

-rw-r--r-- 1 root 4000 0 Dec 24 11:04 foo.foo

(I did this by touch foo.foo; chgrp 4000 foo.foo)

The group file is simply a convenience when it comes to name, and of course to define which users are part of which group.

Likewise, you could in /etc/passwd set user fred to have group 4000 as a number.

I'm not sure if you can have an empty group name in /etc/groups

[And as larsmans points out, NIS may also affect names of users and groups]

I hope this answers your question.

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Group memberships might be defined in NIS instead of /etc/group. Consult your /etc/nsswitch.conf.

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