I have fedora 10 (2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64) installed on a system and am having an issue with a group which apparently exists and has all users as members.

Before it was deleted, all of the users were removed from it but directories using this group with permissions of ?7? could be written to by anyone.

I have now deleted the group and it still appears to exist. I created a new directory and chgrp to the said group and the command completed successfully. I then changed the permissions to ?7? and every user could write to it.

Has anyone encountered this problem before or have any idea how to fix it?

Thank you

The question is: What do you want to fix and what's the name of the group?

The name of the group is smbadm

I want it to be deleted

You need to chown the dirs. Removing a group just removes the entry in/etc/groups. The dirs still exist and (in a listing) will default to showing the grp num instead of the name.

Be sure that smbadm is not a primary group of any user on the system.
Command; should remove the group form the system,but try it when the group is empty.Check all users on the system with the command; to see to which group each user belongs to.

If there is a user in the /etc/passwd with a primary group that does not exist in /etc/group does the group 'exist'. You said use delgroup - the group does not exist in /etc/group.

Yes,the group exist.Please do what chrism01 and I have said no matter if the group exist in the /etc/group or not.

Thanks, I believe that explains the cause of my problem.

Well,you've asked for a solution not for a explanation. --Just kidding.
As chrism01 said when you delete a group from the /etc/group with the command groupedel you're deleting the entry in the /etc/group but there are more files in the system which are in relation with the group.delgroup is a command for deleting a group from the system.For detailed information please search LQ or use Google.