after using newusers    to add 3000 users to our system I
then required them to be put into 2 groups one called staff
one called users.

I generated a list of the usernames to be added to the staff
and users groups and did something like

for i in `cat userlist`
do
    echo "Processing user $i"
    usermod -Gstaff,users $i
done


This should have added all the users in the list to the
groups staff and users.

what II actually got is shown below
(sort of, I'm unable to put the full details in here
(........ indicates other userid's on the line)
(Sample from /etc/group)

users::100:a1000,a1001,a1002........a1678,a1679,a168
0,a1681,a1682,a1683,a1684,a1685...........a2361,a2362,a
2,a999
,a998
,a997
,a996
,a995
,a994
,a993
,a992
,a991
,a990
,a989
,a988
...........   and so on for a few hundred lines


This obviously breaks the group file. We wish to use linux
as a NIS server but if each time we add a user it's going to
break the group file we will have to look to an alternate
platform as we can't afford for the NIS group file to
corrupt each time we add a user.

I would guess this is a problem for anyone else who requires
large groups so that we can do authentication for groups in
samba. This bug was reported for redhat 5.2 as well but I
ended up having to write custom scripts of my own that
didn't break the group file. It seems as though the passwd
and user utilites have some sort of limit (string ?) but
when I put all the members of the group onto a single line
the system worked fine.

Lee