AFS Subtopics in this Guide

AFS Overview (main)
AFS Permissions
AFS PTS Groups
AFS on Windows

AFS File Sharing (in Guide, PDF)

PTS Command Summary

Display the access control list (ACL) of the current directory:
fs la

Create a group:
pts cg owner:group

List group members:
pts m owner:group

Delete a group:
pts del owner:group

Set access for a group:
fs sa dir owner:group access

Add a user to a group:
pts ad userid owner:group

Remove a user:
pts rem userid owner:group

Help on pts commands:
pts help

An ACL group is a defined list of individual users that you can place on the ACLs of your directories. Through groups, you can grant the same access rights to a number of people at once. Instead of adding and removing individuals separately to ACLs, you can add or remove them as a group.

AFS has a limit of 20 separate accesses for each directory anyway, so if you want to grant write access to a directory to 25 people, you would have to put them in a group. There is no restriction on the number of members in a group.

When you create a group, you automatically become its owner. A group's owner is the only person allowed to administer the group, that is, to add or remove members, change the owner, or delete the group entirely.

You create a group with the pts creategroup command (or pts cg):

pts creategroup owner:group

where owner is your own username, and group is a name you make up for the group. Most groups have these two parts: the part before the colon tells who owns the group, and the part after is the group's name.

Groups that you encounter that do not have an owner "prefix" are special groups created by system administrators. All of the groups you create must have an owner prefix and a colon before the group name.

To add a member to the group:

pts adduser username owner:group

(or pts ad), where username is the Eos/ Unity username of the person you want to add, and owner:group is the name of the group you have created. This command places that user in the group.

To check who is in the group:

pts membership owner:group

(or pts m). Other pts commands include pts removeuser username owner:group to remove a user from a group (or pts rem), and pts delete owner:group to delete a group (or pts del).

For example, with the following commands, jqpublic makes a classproj directory that she and three classmates (moe, larry, and curly) can all work in together. jqpublic creates the group jqpublic:projgroup and adds the usernames, moe, larry, and curly, to it. She then adds this group to the ACL of the classproj directory with the fs sa command and gives the group "write" access (rlidwk).

mkdir classproj
cd classproj

pts cg jqpublic:projgroup
pts ad moe jqpublic:projgroup
pts ad larry jqpublic:projgroup
pts ad curly jqpublic:projgroup

Or, to add all three users in one command:

pts ad -user moe larry curly -group jqpublic:projgroup

You grant access for a group the same way you would for an individual:

fs sa . jqpublic:projgroup write

To check the membership of the group:

pts m jqpublic:projgroup
Members of jqpublic: classproj (id: -1234) are:
moe
larry
curly

To get a full listing of pts commands, type pts help.

Related Resources

College of Engineering Locker Portal

AFS at NC State

Open AFS User Guide

Definitions

access control list
AFS

see also

AFS Glossary

Information Technology and Engineering Computer Services (ITECS)
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