group "name" for numberic value 2**32-1?

[Igor Peshansky]

On Fri, 11 Aug 2006, Linda Walsh wrote:

> I ran into a weird "symptom" -- not a bug in anything as near
> as I can tell, just a weirdness.
>
> Everyone once in a while, when I do an "ls -l" on some groups
> of files, I'll see a "group" of ??????.  With "ls -ln", I see
> the group has a value "4294967295".

<http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html#ntsec-ids>

> Would it be misleading or incorrect to insert an entry in
> /etc/group (maybe in mkgroup) mapping that value to "nogroup"?

There may be a legitimate group named "nogroup".  Besides, what's wrong
with "????????" (it's actually 8 question marks)?

> If we insert such things "manually", would it be useful if
> "mkgroup" (and maybe mkpasswd) had some option to "merge"
> non-conflicting entries into their output, or would that
> undesirable for some reason?

As someone who had to add non-Windows groups to /etc/group from time to
time, I'd say it would be a useful capability, but that would require
mkgroup to read /etc/group rather than just dumping groups to standard
output...  You might be better off creating a merge_group tool of some
sort that does the merge for you (i.e., call "mkgroup | merge_group
/etc/group" instead of "mkgroup > /etc/group").  Again,
<http://cygwin.com/acronyms/#PTC>.
	Igor
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