According to YoLinux, group ID 10 typically belongs to wheel. And on my Arch Linux installation, sure enough there in /etc/group
is wheel:10.
However, on my Ubuntu machine instead I'm greeted with uucp
. A quick search turns up the Ubuntu man page of uucp, which seems to have a different purpose.
So why does uucp
get that group ID? Can I replace it or should I just make wheel a different group ID instead?
Best Answer
The group ID number (GID) is not specifically hard-coded to a particular group. It's designated by the entries in the file
/etc/group
. On my Fedora 19 system, for example:While on an Ubuntu system I have:
But these are not set in stone. The numbers are what gets stored when files/directories are written to the filesystem. This file is what takes those numbers and display their corresponding name when you use commands such as
ls -l
.I would simply make the wheel group another entry in that file, and I'd use a command to add it. You can typically add entries using the
addgroup
orgroupadd
commands.Why is UUCP 10 then?
This ordering is a by-product of when the system was either constructed (**NOTE: I'm talking about when these files were constructed by a particular distro's authors) or when the system went through the process of performing package adds/installs using its package manager (i.e. APT, RPM, pacman, etc.).
References