Prepare for confusion…

Standard “nobody” user/group in CRUX:

$ cat /etc/passwd | grep ^no
nobody:x:99:99:nobody:/:


$ cat /etc/group | grep ^no
nobody::99:

Normally (I believe), the group “nogroup” is the corresponding group for the user “nobody”.

Having the group called “nobody” might affect functionality.For instance, slock expects “nogroup” to be the group name. “nogroup” is also the default group name in Devuan, and its ID (65534) also corresponds to the BSD norms. CRUX’s appears to align with Red Hat’s preferred UID/GID (99).

In this example, “nobody” (the user) is also not a member of the “nobody” group. I’m not sure if it should be, or not. I guess not, otherwise you’re giving “nobody” something of an identity by assigning it (them?!) to a group. Again, comparing Devuan, nogroup does not have any members, so this seems normal.

Just the name question, then. I’ll probably put this to the mailing list…

One thought on “nobody/nogroup”

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