Group and users seem to disagree about whether the users are in the group

On my current setup (running Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon), I have an administrative user and several ordinary users. I intend for all of these users to be in the same group, which happens to have the same name as the admin user name. (After doing the basic guided setup and looking up some tutorials, I used adduser to create the standard users and set them to be in the admin user's group.)

Thus, my /etc/passwd contains entries like (anonymized):

adminuser:x:1000:1000:,,,:/home/adminuser:/bin/bash
basicuser:x:1001:1000:Boring Username,,,:/home/basicuser:/bin/bash
plainuser:x:1002:1000:Cliche Username,,,:/home/plainuser:/bin/bash

To my understanding, this should mean that all the users have primary group 1000 (named adminuser) - and therefore, the group with that id should be known to contain all these users.

Acting as the admin user, I try querying what groups basicuser is in:

$ id basicuser 
uid=1001(basicuser) gid=1000(adminuser) groups=1000(adminuser)

$ groups basicuser 
basicuser : adminuser

This is as I expect. However, if I now try using getent to query the group to see which users are in it, I only see the admin user:

$ getent group 1000
adminuser:x:1000:adminuser

Why doesn't it report adminuser:x:1000:adminuser,basicuser,plainuser? Is there a different way I should query for this, or something I have overlooked to make the group membership properly recognized?

posted 8 months ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Karl Knechtel‭

376 reputation 17 7 58 10