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Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2006 18:40:28 -0400 (EDT)
From: Igor Peshansky <pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu>
Reply-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
To: Linda Walsh <cygwin AT tlinx DOT org>
cc: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: group "name" for numberic value 2**32-1?
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On Fri, 11 Aug 2006, Linda Walsh wrote:

> I ran into a weird "symptom" -- not a bug in anything as near
> as I can tell, just a weirdness.
>
> Everyone once in a while, when I do an "ls -l" on some groups
> of files, I'll see a "group" of ??????.  With "ls -ln", I see
> the group has a value "4294967295".

<http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html#ntsec-ids>

> Would it be misleading or incorrect to insert an entry in
> /etc/group (maybe in mkgroup) mapping that value to "nogroup"?

There may be a legitimate group named "nogroup".  Besides, what's wrong
with "????????" (it's actually 8 question marks)?

> If we insert such things "manually", would it be useful if
> "mkgroup" (and maybe mkpasswd) had some option to "merge"
> non-conflicting entries into their output, or would that
> undesirable for some reason?

As someone who had to add non-Windows groups to /etc/group from time to
time, I'd say it would be a useful capability, but that would require
mkgroup to read /etc/group rather than just dumping groups to standard
output...  You might be better off creating a merge_group tool of some
sort that does the merge for you (i.e., call "mkgroup | merge_group
/etc/group" instead of "mkgroup > /etc/group").  Again,
<http://cygwin.com/acronyms/#PTC>.
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
      |\      _,,,---,,_	    pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu | igor AT watson DOT ibm DOT com
ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		Igor Peshansky, Ph.D. (name changed!)
     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		old name: Igor Pechtchanski
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

"Las! je suis sot... -Mais non, tu ne l'es pas, puisque tu t'en rends compte."
"But no -- you are no fool; you call yourself a fool, there's proof enough in
that!" -- Rostand, "Cyrano de Bergerac"

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