How Do Groups Work on Linux?

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Hello! Last week, I thought I knew how users and groups worked on Linux. Here is what I thought:

  1. Every process belongs to a user (like julia)
  2. When a process tries to read a file owned by a group, Linux a) checks if the user julia can access the file, and b) checks which groups julia belongs to, and whether any of those groups owns & can access that file
  3. If either of those is true (or if the ‘any’ bits are set right) then the process can access the file

So, for example, if a process is owned by the julia user and julia is in the awesome group, then the process would be allowed to read this file.

r--r--r-- 1 root awesome     6872 Sep 24 11:09 file.txt

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