When you’re working with linux you might have to add a user to different group.
Let’s say that you want to create user John, and you want John to have root abilities. To do this you’re going to want to add the user, John, to the sudoers group.
The sudoers group controls who has Sudo privileges on a machine. Sudo is a command that allows a user to run commands based on another users privileges, in most instances it is configured to run as root. Fun fact, SUDO was established from “superuser do.”
To add user John to the sudoers group you would do something like this:
# usermod -aG sudoers John
The two options used include:
- a – Add the user to the supplementary group(s). Use only with the -G option.
- G – A list of supplementary groups which the user is also a member of. Each group is separated from the next by a comma, with no intervening whitespace.
You have to use both options in conjunction with each other. You can find a more detailed list of options here: https://linux.die.net/man/8/usermod
This same model applies to any group and can be used for any user. A great example is Apache on a web server. 🙂
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