The group table stores information about workstation user groups. In the AIX environment, it stores three kinds of groups: net groups, NIS+ groups, and UNIX groups. For more information, see group table.
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 Security. A UNIX group is simply a collection of users who are given additional UNIX access permissions.
UNIX 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 | The group's name |
| Passwd | The group's password |
| GID | The group's numerical ID |
| Members | The names of the group members, separated by commas |
