The group table stores information about workstation user groups. In the operating system environment, it stores three kinds of groups: net groups, NIS+ groups, and operating system groups.
A net group is a group of workstations and users that have permission to perform remote operations on other workstations in the group. An NIS+ group is a set of NIS+ users that can be assigned access rights to an NIS+ object. They are described in NIS Security in AIX 5L Version 5.2 Security Guide. An operating system group is simply a collection of users who are given additional operating system access permissions.
Operating system groups allow a set of users on the network to access a set of files on several workstations or servers without making those files available to everyone. For example, the engineering and marketing staff working on a particular project could form a workstation user group.
The group table has four columns:
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | Group name |
| Passwd | Group password |
| GID | Group numerical ID |
| Members | Names of the group members, separated by commas |