The
netgroup file specifies “netgroups”, which are sets of
(host, user, domain) tuples that are to be given similar network access.
Each line in the file consists of a netgroup name followed by a list of the members of the netgroup. Each member can be either the name of another netgroup or a specification of a tuple as follows:
where the
host,
user, and
domain are character string names for the corresponding component. Any of the comma separated fields may be empty to specify a “wildcard” value or may consist of the string “
-” to specify “no valid value”. The members of the list may be separated by whitespace; the “\” character may be used at the end of a line to specify line continuation. The functions specified in
getnetgrent(3) should normally be used to access the
netgroup database.
If ‘files' is specified for the ‘netgroup' database in
nsswitch.conf(5), (or no ‘netgroup' entry is specified), then these functions operate on the
db(3) version of the
netgroup (netgroup.db) file which can be generated using
netgroup_mkdb(8). If ‘nis' is specified then the NIS maps ‘netgroup', ‘netgroup.byhost', and ‘netgroup.byuser' are used.
Lines that begin with a # are treated as comments.