Directory ownership by a group

User's creation was covered by question 008

Question:
Create a directory named /common. Allow john and davis to share documents in
the /common directory using a group called team. Both of them can read, write and remove
documents from the other in this directory but any user not member of the group can’t.

(scroll down for an answer)

Answer:
As mentioned above - creation of user is covered in question 008. Also it is always worth
mentioning that in the questions related to creating something it is better to actually create
everything before we delve deeper into configuration (folders/files/users/groups/partitions)

First we create a directory which is pretty straightforward (however creating user-related

folders in root hierarchy is not a good idea)

mkdir /common

Then we create mentioned group and assign it as an owner of already created folder:

groupadd team
chgrp team /common

Here is the most tricky part. To achieve our goal we will be using SGID, which is a concept that
users operating on the files are given the same permissions like to group owner of the
folder/file. We've already set group owner for the folder so now we assign permissions to it.

chmod 2770 /common

Notice the 2 prefix in the access rights. This sets up SGID. That means that any user from the group
that owns the file/folder will be given group permissions when operating on it. It simplifies
administration as You do not have to give users access via ACLs to the folder, rather than just
assign them to the group and that's it.

Finally we need to remember to actually add our users to the mentioned group team.

usermod -aG team john

usermod -aG team davis

Additional comment:
It is possible to change user's primary group for the current session using newgrpcommand.