MacOS – the wheel user group for

macosunix

The output of groups after sudo bash lists the following groups:

wheel daemon kmem sys tty operator procview procmod everyone staff certusers localaccounts admin com.apple.sharepoint.group.2 _appstore _lpadmin _lpoperator _developer com.apple.access_screensharing com.apple.access_ssh com.apple.sharepoint.group.1

What is the wheel user group for and why is it called wheel?

Best Answer

Quoting from this superuser answer by Rich Homolka:

Mac OS X has roots in BSD UNIX, a.k.a. the UNIX that came out of UC Berkeley. They had a group of trusted people that could become superuser by using the su command. So they coded their UNIX to only allow people in this specific group to become superuser using su. They chose the groupname 'wheel', supposedly reference to other systems that had WHEEL, possibly a reference to being a 'big wheel'

It's less important now that you have the GUI authorization popups and sudo. You can use sudo without being in wheel group I believe.

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MacOS – Proper group ID (gid) for Lion

I haven't seen any difference in how OS X treats the primary group vs. a user's other groups, so I don't think it makes any real difference. I'd be inclined to "fix" it for neatness, though. These commands should set the primary group to 20, and then add a "secondary" membership in the old andrew group:

sudo dscl . create /Users/andrew PrimaryGroupID 20
sudo dseditgroup -o edit -a andrew -t user andrew

(Note: using dscl to add secondary group memberships doesn't quite do it right -- use dseditgroup instead.)

MacOS – How to remove group membership from user using the Lion Terminal

Try this command to remove the user from a particular group

dseditgroup -o edit -d $Username -t user $GroupName

dseditgroup -o edit -d _denyhosts -t user workgroup

Best Answer

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