I've have a script that my users use to create pseudo-anonymous FTP
accounts. All they enter is the username and password and the script
creates all the necessary directories. In order for these to work right,
the created accounts need to exist in a couple of groups.
My script is a cut-down version of the standard adduser shell script and it
adds people to groups with
sed '/^'${GROUP}':/s/$/,'${USER}'/' /etc/ptmp/group > /etc/ptmp/tmpgroup
In my testing this worked fine, but now some of these groups are getting
quite large and the process has been failing because the group line is
getting wrapped (often with multiple blank lines). I set out to fix this
today and 'discovered' the other set of user management tools: useradd,
groupadd, usermod etc. I tried usermod to add a user to one of these long
groups and it seemed to work like a charm. But it also reformatted the
group file. Where I originally had
grpname:*:125:fred,john,.... --> to 60 names
I now had
grpname:*:125:fred,john, .... --> about 200 chars
grpname:*:125:wendy,alice....
grpname:*:125:bonnie,charlie....
Cool, I thought, that's a much more readable format for the file..one I
didn't know worked. The problem is, it doesn't work. FTP was the first
casualty..if you weren't on the first line of a multi-line group then you
weren't part of that group. I thought the functionality of reading such
things was via standard system libraries so I decided to recompile FTP (we
use wu-ftpd). That didn't work and then I noted that I could not su to
root. Su (or login) couldn't figure out that I was in the system group. I
put the group file back the way it was and I'm now on my quest to fix my
original problem.
My real question in all this is what good are these utilities, useradd,
groupadd, et al, if they don't create files that the rest of the system can
use? I don't see anything in the man pages to indicate why one should use
useradd over adduser. This is on a DU 4.0B system. Any ideas?
_______________________________________________________________________
Rick Beebe (203) 785-4566
Network Engineering Manager FAX: (203) 737-4037
ITS-Med Technology Operations Richard.Beebe_at_yale.edu
Yale University School of Medicine
P.O. Box 208089, New Haven, CT 06520-8089
_______________________________________________________________________
Received on Thu Mar 12 1998 - 22:35:04 NZDT