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Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1996 22:13:44 -0800 (PST)
From: Doug White <dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu>
Reply-To: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu
To: Gianmarco Giovannelli <gmarco@scotty.masternet.it>
cc: questions@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: users & mail & group 
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On Wed, 13 Nov 1996, Gianmarco Giovannelli wrote:

> 1) Why adduser add the user name in /etc/group even if it isn't mandatory ?
> I explain better . If I create the user "gmarco" that belongs to group 2000
> (user) adduser add gmarco to 2000 group in /etc/group even if 2000 is the
> default group of gmarco. I always have to delete the username after the
> group by hand. It begin to be annoying :-)

Adduser enforces a type of system administration where everyone has their
own login group and you add people to other groups for permissions.  It
solves problems with the 1024 character limit / line in /etc/group and
makes some sysadmin tasks really easy.  Note that you can configure
adduser to put the user in other groups, and if you got really annoyed
with it you could vi /usr/bin/adduser and fix it. :)  adduser is a perl
script BTW.

> 2) How I can send a mail to all the user of a group ? I.e. I'd like to send
> a mail to all the users belong to 2000 group. Is it possible or I must use
> an alias followed by all the names in the same line ? (I have 300 users to
> administer and I think it isn't safe to add everyone to the line of the
> group.)

Copy the group line into /etc/aliases, put a space after the :, save/quit,
and run 'newaliases'.

Doug White                              | University of Oregon  
Internet:  dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu    | Residence Networking Assistant
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite    | Computer Science Major