Member list limit in /etc/group file

Question

I'm creating user with group in my busybox Linux machine

addgroup group1
adduser user1 -G group1

after creating 20 users I'm getting error like "adduser: unknown group group1",

cat /etc/group
group1:x:1002:user1,user2,user3,user4,user5,user6,user7,user8,user9,user10,user11,user12,user13,user14,user15,user16,user17,user18,user19,user20

So is there any limit of adding member list in /etc/group?

for the record there is a hardcoded limit in busybox "libpwdgrp/pwd_grp.c" So you could patch busybox or uclib (it depends on your system) to extend the line buffer length the issue has been reported here http://bugs.alpinelinux.org/issues/733 — hostmaster, Feb 05 '14 at 11:15

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 05 '14 at 09:26

0

Which Linux distribution do you actually use ? adduser has a different syntax at least in Ubuntu/Debian by the way I've just made group with 200 user without problem

for i in `seq 1 100`; do echo adduser -G group1 "user$i"|| break ; done

So it seems to me problem is in another place.

answered Feb 05 '14 at 09:26

hostmaster

1,822
16
17

I'm using busybox's addgroup,adduser – Rahul R Dhobi Feb 05 '14 at 09:30
It is definitely a busybox limitation. I've got the same result with my openwrt box. – hostmaster Feb 05 '14 at 10:02
:Are you sure about this behaviour ? – Rahul R Dhobi Feb 05 '14 at 10:07
I am afraid I don't understand what you mean – hostmaster Feb 05 '14 at 10:21
In my case `useradd` doesn't work after 23-th user. However, I've been able to add users into a group manually I've edited /etc/group directly in vi and it works as expected – hostmaster Feb 05 '14 at 10:31
Yes exactly,but why busybox's adduser allows only 23 user in /etc/group? – Rahul R Dhobi Feb 05 '14 at 10:37
let us [continue this discussion in chat](http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/46833/discussion-between-rahul-r-dhobi-and-hostmaster) – Rahul R Dhobi Feb 05 '14 at 10:37

Member list limit in /etc/group file

1 Answers1