Group passwords is a sort of obscure feature most people don’t use. It is safer *not* to have passwords set for groups.

By setting a password to a group, you allow an arbitrary users to be part of that group as long as they know the password. That generally doesn’t make any sense unless you need to grant a shell user temporary access to a certain group. I don’t even know if it works as advertised.

If you see this at webmin for example, you can safely ignore this option. For more information, see:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Shadow-Password-HOWTO-7.html

Archived Comments

You can use “gpasswd” for assigning grou…

Unknown - Nov 5, 2012

You can use “gpasswd” for assigning group password,more detail use man page “man gpasswd”.