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Windows have lots of well-known groups and users that all installations have by default. For example, the Administrator user is a member of the Administrators group, or any user is a member of the Users group, etc. Does Linux have such common groups/users other than root?

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Damn Vegetables
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1 Answers1

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I put the answer as community wiki because there are many groups.

Note: distributions will have also own rules, and in theory every service (from package) should have own group. We just disregard these (too many), but for few exceptions where it is more standardized (e.g. some distribution use www-data instead of the daemon name: reason).

  • root is the basic group for root
  • nogroup is the group no files should have, so to to make not useful group permissions. (set your daemon to this group if you do not need group permissions).
  • wheel is the group of root administrator, sudo may use it, or just the name
  • daemon is the default group for daemons, but each deamon should use own group to keep things segregated (and so if one daemon got compromised, the other should be ok).
  • tty is for consoles
  • man is for man pages, or better: for man to write the cached man pages
  • users should contains all normal users
  • staff should contain staff users (what they can do depends on the distribution)
  • adm should be for admins. Log files often use this groups
  • mail for mailboxes. mail group write, specific user can read (set to each mailbox).
  • disk for disk devices. E.g. you can give a program disk permission to check from time to time disks (e.g. fdisk), without giving it too much permissions (OTOH if one can write to disk, can overwrite all files).

etc.

Giacomo Catenazzi
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