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Comment by Canada | Hacker News Reader

All of the system group names that own resources for specific applications have been underscore prefixed for years... like

  ...
  _bgpd:*:75:
  _tcpdump:*:76:
  _dhcp:*:77:
  _mopd:*:78:
  _tftpd:*:79:
  _rbootd:*:80:
  _ppp:*:82:
  _ntp:*:83:
  _ftp:*:84:
  _ospfd:*:85:
  _hostapd:*:86:
  ...

but not the general ones like wheel, sys, daemon, tty, nobody, etc.

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If I recall correctly, all system groups should have a leading underscore for OpenBSD. However, they make exceptions for groups that have been around long before this became their standard.

Prefix code blocks by two spaces.

Now I wonder why my FreeBSD systems use underscores for some groups, but only a few of them.

  $ grep ^_ /etc/group
  _pflogd:*:64:
  _dhcp:*:65:
  _ypldap:*:160:

Yeah thanks, I edited that like 10 times dealing with escaping the asterisks with backslash, adding the two spaces, removing the escaping, newlines, etc :)

All of those are examples of privilege seperated software imported from OpenBSD, pf and thus pflogd(8), dhclient(8) and yplapd(8).

https://www.openbsd.org/innovations.html

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