Hello!
I am writing a SlackBuild script and in the doinst.sh file I need to create a user "someuser" and a group "somegroup" and then add that user to that group.
So far I figured out how to check if the user already exists:

if cat /etc/passwd | cut -f 1 -d : | grep -q someuser; then echo "there is someuser"; fi

whether the group exists:

if cat /etc/group | cut -f 1 -d : | grep -q someuser; then echo "there is somegroup"; fi

and whether the user someuser is a member of the group somegroup:

if groups someuser | grep -q somegroup; then echo "is a member";else echo "is not a member"; fi

The question is in case both the user and the group exist, but the user is not a member of the group, how do I add that user to that group. In short how do I add an existing user to an existing group?

Googling has suggested doing it by:

usermod -aG somegroup someuser

Unfortunately the usermod command on Slackware 12.0 does not support the -a option. I need the latter because I do not want to lose the other groups that someuser is a member of. Is there some other simple way of doing that?

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Regards,
Martin

PS Let me know if the usermod command in Slackware 12.1 supports the -a option.

usermod -G somegroup someuser accomplishes what you want... (see man usermod).

I believe "gpasswd -a" is what you need.

I remembered seeing this in a thread I'm posted in recently and sure enough, doing a simple LQ search for "usermod" helped me find the thread.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...1/#post3129078

Summary: try gpasswd -a username groupname

1 members found this post helpful.

No it does not. Please read the thread I linked to above.

If you're writing this build script for SlackBuilds.org submission, don't bother to add the automatic group addition and such, as we'll just remove it. That needs to be documented in the README for the administrator to do.