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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!hp9000.csc.cuhk.hk!saimiri.primate.wisc.edu!sdd.hp.com!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!epiwrl.entropic.com!usenet From: kenh@wrl.epi.com (Ken Hornstein) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: NetBSD 0.9: Unable to su to root from wheel group Date: 20 Jan 1994 13:04:15 -0500 Organization: Entropic Research Laboratory, Washington DC Lines: 18 Message-ID: <2hmh2v$c9s@sparc10.entropic.com> References: <17JAN94.15533228@tifrvax.tifr.res.in> <2hkq26$23j@cynjut.ogisd.ess.harris.com> Reply-To: kenh@wrl.epi.com NNTP-Posting-Host: sparc10.entropic.com In article <2hkq26$23j@cynjut.ogisd.ess.harris.com>, Dave Burgess <burgess@cynjut.ogisd.ess.harris.com> wrote: >A disconcerting feature of this function is that the man page, in fact, >does not seem to be completely true. My version says that "A user is >automatically in a group if that group was specified in their >/etc/passwd entry and does not need to be added to that group in the >/etc/group file." While this may be true for other groups, it is >clearly not true for wheel (as our original poster has shown). So, is >this a bug or a feature? Since it is not covered on the group(5) man >page, I assume that it is a bug and will remain one until it is properly >documented :-)... Actually, if you look at the code for su, you'll see that it only checks "auxiliarlly" groups (ones that list you in /etc/group) and not your "primary" group (the one listed in /etc/passwd). It's really a bug/feature of su (I'm not sure which one to call it :-) ). --Ken