usermod

shanenin · 12-04-2003, 12:33 PM

I just installed tuxracer, it gives me this output

Code:

* Remember, in order to play games, you have to
 * be in the 'games' group.
 * See the usermod(8) manpage for more information.

 * If you had the game installed before please reset
 * the data_dir variable in ~/.tuxracer/options
>>> Regenerating /etc/ld.so.cache...
 * Caching service dependencies...

I did do man usermod, could you dumb it down a little for me.

maybe this
#usermod -G games (user)

I don't want to screw up my user account

Tinkster · 12-04-2003, 12:44 PM

If you do that games will be the only group
the user will be in. Probably not what you want.
Youd have to check which groups the user
already is in, and add those to your list, too.

Alternatively, just manually edit /etc/groups
locate the line that starts with games, and
append the user to it ... if there's currently
NO users, just type his name, if there already
are some, append him using a , before his name.

Cheers,
Tink

Tramontane · 12-04-2003, 02:04 PM

a simple command to use would be:

adduser (user) games

this will accomplish the same thing as manually editting /etc/group. caveat - both the user and group must already exist.

also, the new group info will not take effect until that user logs in again at through a tty terminal(logging back in to KDE or using 'su' is not enough).

Tinkster · 12-04-2003, 02:33 PM

adduser would be quite distro-dependent then ...

In slack adduser creates a new user account :}

Cheers,
Tink

Tramontane · 12-08-2003, 08:49 AM

I can't speak for slackware as my experience so far has been limited to debian. adduser can also be used to add users to a system, so I guess the ability to modify group members is just a little extra functionality. It seems that it's just a perl script that makes calls to useradd and it's ilk.

so here are the relevant parts of that script

Code:

NAME
       adduser, addgroup - add a user or group to the system

SYNOPSIS
       adduser  [options] [--home DIR] [--shell SHELL] [--no-cre_
       ate-home]  [--uid  ID]  [--firstuid  ID]  [--lastuid   ID]
       [--ingroup GROUP | --gid ID] [--disabled-password] [--dis_
       abled-login] [--gecos GECOS] user

       adduser --system [options] [--home  DIR]  [--shell  SHELL]
       [--no-create-home] [--uid ID] [--group | --ingroup GROUP |
       --gid   ID]    [--disabled-password]    [--disabled-login]
       [--gecos GECOS] user

       adduser --group [options] [--gid ID] group
       addgroup [options] [--gid ID] group

       adduser [options] user group

Code:

    printf _("Adding user %s to group %s...\n"),$existing_user,$existing_group
        if $verbose;
    &invalidate_nscd();
    # FIXME - the next line has a race condition.
    #&systemcall('usermod', '-G',
                #join(",", get_users_groups($existing_user), $existing_group),
                #$existing_user);
    &systemcall('gpasswd', '-M',
                join(',', get_group_members($existing_group), $existing_user),
                $existing_group);
    #&systemcall('gpasswd', '-a',$existing_user,$existing_group);
    &invalidate_nscd();
    print _("Done.\n") if $verbose;
    exit 0;

so maybe if your distribution has the gpasswd program(which is binary, so not script) you could look into that. But I guess at this point it's easier to just edit the files by hand anyway.

Thanks for the heads up, Tink