[GTALUG] (question) What is the purpose of UID==GID?

Lennart Sorensen lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca
Mon Jan 11 10:19:12 UTC 2016


On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 03:30:12AM -0500, William Park wrote:
> Just curious...
> 
> I noticed that distros tend to create user account with unique UID and
> unique GID (and usually both are the same id).  For example, UID=1000
> and GID=1000.
> 
> What is the reason behind it?

There isn't one.

But most distributions use uid/gid 1000+ as regular users, and if you
always create a user and their matching group (as the adduser and such
tools do by default), then the assigned numbers will always stay in sync
since they are allocated at the same rate.

So it is pretty much just a coincidence.

-- 
Len Sorensen


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