The basic idea of the workgroups system is to organize users who work together into groups. For example, at a university users might be divided into faculty, staff and student groups. At a business users might be grouped by job categories such as management, sales and secretarial. Users in the same workgroup can give each other special privileges to access files. For example, all the users in the managers group can edit the EmployeeEval file while all the users in the sales group can edit the NovSales file.
Every user is a member of at least one group and users can be members of multiple groups.
Execute the groups command to display the groups that you belong to. The first group shown is considered the primary group . In the above example, the primary group is managers . A newly created file or directory is associated with the username and primary group of the person who created it. For example, suppose Kathy whose username is kathyr and primary group is sales starts a text editor and creates the file NovSales .