How to manage lists

To Moira, a list is simply, well, a list. The items on an Moira list are called members. Each member of an Moira list has two attributes: a type and a name. A Moira list can have several types of members. The only ones useful to most users are users, other lists, and arbitrary strings such as electronic mail addresses.

Lists can serve several functions. The two most common are UNIX groups and mailing lists. Your list is a Unix AFS group. You use it to control file access. For more information about AFS groups, look at the manual pages for the AFS fs utility, and chmod (change mode) by typing add afsuser; man fs and man chmod. You can also find information in this guide in SIPB's Inessential AFS guide and in the OLC answers repository (olc answers).

The main tool that you will use to manipulate lists is listmaint. Listmaint is a fairly self-explanatory, menu-based program. To run listmaint, just type listmaint. Here is what the top-level menu of listmaint looks like:

athena% listmaint

                                   List Menu 
 1. (show)         Display information about a list.
 2. (add)          Create new List.
 3. (update)       Update characteristics of a list.
 4. (delete)       Delete a List.
 5. (query_remove) Interactively remove an item from all lists.
 6. (members)      Member Menu - Change/Show Members of a List..
 7. (list_info)    List Info Menu.
 8. (quotas)       Quota Menu.
 9. (help)         Print Help.
 t. (toggle)       Toggle logging on and off.
 q. (quit)         Quit.
 t. (toggle)       Toggle logging on and off.
 q. (quit)         Quit.
Command:

To add someone to your list, select members from listmaint's top-level menu. This will ask you for the name of a list and then put you in a submenu entitled Change/Display membership of 'list', where list is the list you specified. As you may expect, you will want to select add from this menu. You will be asked what type of member you wish to add. The answer to this question should be user. You will then be asked for the name of the user you wish to add. At this prompt, enter the user's username. You will be told whether the operation completed successfully.

Using listmaint is rather straight-forward. Once you get the hang of things, you will probably be able to figure out how to do mostly anything you want to.

You can also use blanche instead of listmaint. blanche can perform a number of the operations listmaint performs, and for those operations is much quicker. For a quick list of the functions blanche can perform, simply type man blanche. For more detailed information, read the manpages for all of the above.