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Re: Different commands give different groups


On 09/30/2011 09:49 PM, gsingh93 wrote:

Why do these two commands give different groups? It's the same user.

Because the effective gid set for the existing process differs from the recorded groups in /etc/groups - most likely, you've changed /etc/groups but haven't logged out and back in to start a new process hierarchy that uses the new groups.



Gulshan@GSJK-PC /etc $ id Gulshan uid=1000(Gulshan) gid=545(Users) groups=545(Users),0(root)

That's what the groups will be if a new process is started for Gulshan.



Gulshan@GSJK-PC /etc $ id uid=1000(Gulshan) gid=545(Users) groups=545(Users),513(None)

Whereas that's what the groups are now for the current process.


This aspect of your situation is not cygwin-specific, the same behavior can be observed in other OSs when you change the user database after a particular user already has a process started.


Furthermore, the commands mkgroup and mkpasswd give the orginial states of their corresponding files instead of what I changed them to. Why is that?

This part is cygwin-specific - and the answer is that mkgroup and mkpasswd are querying Window's database of user information, not /etc (so that you can then populate /etc with information that matches the Window's database). Windows doesn't care what you put in /etc, so the amount of changes you can make in those files that still have a worthwhile visible effect to cygwin processes is a bit limited.


--
Eric Blake   eblake@redhat.com    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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