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ziaee
des
maxim

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Summary

I'm not 100% sure whether every statement and group description is true for FreeBSD and its current state. Please, point out mistakes in my assumptions.

The group list is sorted by GID. All the group names from /usr/src/etc/group are described, except "uucp": honestly, I don't know what it is used for and what to say about it.

PR: 264966
Obtained from: NetBSD

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rG FreeBSD src repository

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tembun_bk.ru created this revision.Dec 7 2025, 9:01 PM

Herald added a subscriber: imp. · View Herald TranscriptDec 7 2025, 9:01 PM

tembun_bk.ru requested review of this revision.Dec 7 2025, 9:01 PM

tembun_bk.ru added inline comments.Dec 7 2025, 9:11 PM

share/man/man7/groups.7
4–5	What should I do with the license? The page was not only imported, but changed for FreeBSD. I also did change some of the original parts.
208	I'm not sure if I'm right about this one.
247	I'm not quite sure about this one too. If I understand correctly, it must be somehow related to group "uucp" (which is missed), since on my machine /dev/cuau2 is owned by used "uucp" and in group "dialer".
253	I'm not sure if it's really unused now. Didn't find much about it in /usr/src.
265	As above.
269	Didn't have any experience with it, just tried to deduce what it is used for :)
301	That's only my guess described here. Maybe there is a different reason why there are "nogroup" and "nobody".

'December' instead of 'Dec'.

tembun_bk.ru mentioned this in D54154: groups.7: Cross-reference in other man pages.Dec 9 2025, 4:41 PM

ziaee added a child revision: D54154: groups.7: Cross-reference in other man pages.Dec 9 2025, 5:19 PM

Add groups(7) cross-references into other man pages.

I'm also going to port users(7) man page. The structure and the overall idea of these two pages are very similar; do you have some notes/advises that I can learn from this page and apply to users(7)?

@ziaee I've been thinking: maybe it would be a nice idea to create hard links for this manual page: wheel.7 and operator.7? wheel and operator are the most noticeable groups and people frequently have questions about their purpose, so it would be nice to be able to do man wheel or man operator. We have the similar thing for builtin.1 which has a link to every builtin command: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/share/man/man1/Makefile?id=4b0d5d1d6a7c9773e38882feb4747a76b37a645c#n13

Sorry I haven't had time to review this yet!

I don't know about adding mlinks. We can't really do it consistently without creating a lot of collision in the apropos database, which is hard for beginners to navigate.

share/man/man7/groups.7
4–5	The license always stays, that's what the first clause therein says (lines 9 and 10), but add a SPDX tag at the top so we can index it mechanically.

tembun_bk.ru added inline comments.Jan 3 2026, 5:15 PM

share/man/man7/groups.7
4–5	That should be 'SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-2-Clause', right?

imp added inline comments.Jan 3 2026, 5:32 PM

share/man/man7/groups.7
4–5	Yes. I believe this is the standard BSD-2-Clause, or close enough, that this is the right thing.

Add SPDX-License-Identifier.

tembun_bk.ru marked 2 inline comments as done.Jan 3 2026, 5:55 PM

In D54114#1244827, @ziaee wrote:

Sorry I haven't had time to review this yet!

I don't know about adding mlinks. We can't really do it consistently without creating a lot of collision in the apropos database, which is hard for beginners to navigate.

@imp (sorry, I'm not sure if you can answer this, but since you've been active on this revision) do you think that adding mlinks would be worth it or it is better to avoid such hard links?

Update diff with -U9999.

Ping.

tembun_bk.ru added a reviewer: Contributor Reviews (src).Feb 4 2026, 6:19 PM

tembun_bk.ru added a project: docs.

Document that games group is used by hgame(4) (since b6cad334e64).
Correct several mandoc -T lint warnings.
Document that bind(8) was removed from the base in FreeBSD 10.0.
Replace reference to unbound(8) with local-unbound(8).
Remove references to setuid(7), since NetBSD has this page, but FreeBSD does not.

Add MLINKS: wheel.7 and operator.7.

Could somebody please review this? Or maybe tag appropriate people?

tembun_bk.ru added inline comments.Mar 15 2026, 6:31 PM

share/man/man7/groups.7

41–43

May be that would be relevant to mention that this behaviour can be changed with pam_group(8)? From su(1):

PAM is used to set the policy su will use.  In particular, by default only users in the “wheel” group can switch to UID 0 (“root”).  This group requirement may be changed by modifying the “pam_group” section of /etc/pam.d/su.  See pam_group(8) for details on how to modify this setting.

groups.7: Standard group names
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Diff 168970

share/man/man5/group.5

share/man/man5/passwd.5

share/man/man7/Makefile

share/man/man7/groups.7

usr.bin/id/groups.1

usr.bin/id/id.1

usr.bin/newgrp/newgrp.1

usr.sbin/adduser/adduser.8

usr.sbin/chkgrp/chkgrp.8

usr.sbin/chown/chgrp.1

usr.sbin/chown/chown.8

usr.sbin/pw/pw.8

groups.7: Standard group namesNeeds ReviewPublicActions

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Revision ContentsChangeset List

Diff 168970

share/man/man5/group.5

share/man/man5/passwd.5

share/man/man7/Makefile

share/man/man7/groups.7

usr.bin/id/groups.1

usr.bin/id/id.1

usr.bin/newgrp/newgrp.1

usr.sbin/adduser/adduser.8

usr.sbin/chkgrp/chkgrp.8

usr.sbin/chown/chgrp.1

usr.sbin/chown/chown.8

usr.sbin/pw/pw.8

groups.7: Standard group names
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