Adm Group
 

I am running Mandrake which creates various groups by default, one of them being the adm group. Now my understanding is that the adm group allows a user belonging to that group to perform administrative tasks. What baffles me is that assuming I create a new user and if I do not add that user to the adm group he/she can't even run the ls command. Is this a security undertaking by Mandrake? Also how do I know which commands are available to what groups?

On some distro's it's common to put each user into his own group. Unprivileged users do not need to be in more privileged groups by default to run common commands. Unprivileged users need to have a shell set (like /bin/bash). If that shell is set, and systemwide shell resource files (in case of Bash: /etc/profile, /etc/bashrc and /etc/profile.d/) are available, on login the shell will read those. From those the default PATH statement should be set. Not being able to run available common commands usually means the PATH statement lacks one of /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin.