Saturday, March 12, 2022

[SOLVED] What's the difference between commands cat /etc/group & groups & getent group

Issue

I am a novice Unix user and was wondering where all the groups are stored in Unix. I thought that they would be updated in /etc/group file but when I read that file it does not have everything. Whereas, getent group command displays all the groups and associated users in each group.

I am aware that each user has a primary group, which will be stored in /etc/passwd (usually in field 4), and may have one or more supplementary groups. Only the supplementary group associations are in /etc/group

So, here are my questions.

  1. Am I under the wrong impression that all groups are stored in /etc/group ?

  2. If so, what is the difference between these three commands

    a. cat /etc/group
    b. groups
    c. getent group

  3. Why am I able to see more groups when I use the command getent groups than cat /etc/group ?

Please let me know.


Solution

getent reads from /etc/groups and whatever other database sources are configured for your system. For a Solaris system, this is stored in SMF:

$ svcprop -p config name-service/switch 
config/automount astring files\ ldap
config/default astring files
config/group astring files\ ldap
config/host astring files\ dns
config/netgroup astring ldap
config/password astring files\ ldap
config/value_authorization astring solaris.smf.value.name-service.switch

For a linux system, have a look at /etc/nsswitch.conf



Answered By - James McPherson
Answer Checked By - Cary Denson (WPSolving Admin)
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