What's the purpose of the "bin" group?
The base-passwd
package guarantees the presence of certain users and certain groups in a system. The documentation is in /usr/share/doc/base-passwd/users-and-groups.txt.gz
(or /usr/share/doc/base-passwd/users-and-groups.html
) (source available online in Debian Salsa):
bin
HELP: No files on my system are owned by user or group bin. What good are
they? Historically they were probably the owners of binaries in /bin? It is
not mentioned in the FHS, Debian Policy, or the changelogs of base-passwd
or base-files.
LSB 1.3 lists bin as legacy, and says: "The 'bin' UID/GID is included for
compatibility with legacy applications. New applications should no longer
use the 'bin' UID/GID."
So, it's part of the LSB specification, and since Debian used to aim for LSB compliance, Ubuntu has a bin
user and group.
/usr
was the original path for user homes in historic Unix, so there was a bin
user in charge of /usr/bin
- compare how the root user is implemented in these (and also in some more modern ones - Solaris, etc.) systems, it has /
, not /root
, as home directory.