groups Command

Purpose

Displays group membership.

Syntax

groupsUser... ]

Description

The groups command by default writes to standard ouput the group membership of the current process. If multiple users are specified as command parameters, then the group membership for each user will be displayed.

The groups command will continue its operation with the next user in the parameter list after issuing a warning message if the user given is not found in the user database.

Security

Access Control: This program should be installed as a normal user program in the Trusted Computing Base.

Examples

To display the group membership of users listed in the parameter list, enter:

$ groups sys root lp adm
sys : sys
root : system bin sys security cron audit lp
lp : lp printq
adm : adm

Files

Item Description
/usr/bin/groups Contains the groups command
/usr/ucb/groups Symbolic link to the groups command
/etc/group Group file; contains group IDs
/etc/ogroup Previous version of the group file
/etc/passwd Password file; contains user IDs
/etc/opasswd Previous version of the password file.