[NCLUG] Why one group per user and SGID home dirs

[Matt Taggart]

Mike Loseke writes...

>  Giving each user a group with his name may have been done to cater to
> those new to *nix so as to not confuse them. That's the only reason I can
> think of anyway.

No, adding the group per user is what allows you open up your umask.

> Adding sgid to a user's home dir just promotes lazy and
> sloppy users. /home/user is for 'user' and him only. Nobody else needs to
> be writing files in there.

If you rephase this to say, "a user's group is for 'user' and him only" then I 
would agree. Even though I don't like the idea of users opening up subdirs in 
their $HOME dir I still think the need exists. When I was in school I often 
had the need to share files with classmates and didn't have access to 
use/create a /project dir. In some cases the files I wanted to share didn't 
even warant creating a separate /project directory.

> This should be used in project dirs where that
> sort of behaviour is desired and/or required but not across the board,
> IMO.

And without a group per user then a user can't open up their umask to take 
advanage of such behavior.

-- 
Matt Taggart
matt at lackof.org