Group (computing)

In computing, the term group generally refers to a grouping of users. In principle, users may belong to none, one, or many groups (although in practice some systems place limits on this.) The primary purpose of user groups is to simplify access control to computer systems.

Suppose a computer science department has a network which is shared by students and academics. The department has made a list of directories which the students are permitted to access and another list of directories which the staff are permitted to access. Without groups, administrators would give each student permission to every student directory, and each staff member permission to every staff directory. In practice, that would be very unworkable – every time a student or staff member arrived, administrators would have to allocate permissions on every directory.

With groups, the task is much simpler: create a student group and a staff group, placing each user in the proper group. The entire group can be granted access to the appropriate directory. To add or remove an account, one must only need to do it in one place (in the definition of the group), rather than on every directory. This workflow provides clear separation of concerns: to change access policies, alter the directory permissions; to change the individuals which fall under the policy, alter the group definitions.

The primary uses of groups are:

Many systems provide facilities for delegation of group administration. In these systems, when a group is created, one or more users may be named as group administrators. These group administrators are then capable of adding and removing other users from the group, without relying on a system administrator.

Some systems also provide joinable groups, which are groups to which users may elect to add themselves. Joinable groups are not intended to be used for access control, but rather for such purposes as electronic mailing lists.

Many systems (especially systems) offer the facility of dynamic groups. Traditionally groups are static: one defines a group by individually selecting its members. In dynamic groups, however, an administrator can specify search criteria. All users which match the search criteria will be considered a member of this dynamic group.

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