Next: Getting information through moira Previous: Things Not To Do Up: Athena glue-all, or Your Fate

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. When you registered for your account, you were given a list containing one member: you, the user. If your username were juser, your list would be called juser and would have one member: USER juser. A list has other properties besides members. The most important of these is the administrator. If you registered for your account before September, 1988, your list may be its own administrator. This means that any member of the list could add members, or even delete you from the list! This section will show you how to correct this.

Lists can serve several functions. The two most common are UNIX groups and mailing lists. Your list is a Unix group. You use it to control file access. For more information about Unix groups, look at the manual pages for chgrp (change group), and chmod (change mode) by typing man chgrp and man chmod. You can also find information in this guide in the File Protection section.

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:

If you registered for your account before September, 1988, the first thing you will want to do is to claim rightful ownership of your personal list. To do this, you should first select update from the top-level menu. Once you do this, listmaint will ask you for the name of the list that you wish to update. Here, enter your username. Then listmaint will ask you several questions about the list. You can safely ignore most of these by just hitting return. The one you are interested is the question `` What Type of Administrator''. The current value will be show in square brackets. If you registered before September, 1988, the type will probably be list. You want the type to be user instead. You should type user at that prompt. You can then just hit return for the remaining questions until you are told that the list has been updated.

Another thing you may wish to do if you are using NFS is to add someone to your list. (If you don't know whether you're using NFS or AFS, you're almost certainly using AFS. If you have a standard Athena student account and you log in on public workstations or via dialup, you are using AFS.) If you do this, you can give that person extra access to your files. To learn how to do this, you can read the File Protections section of this guide.

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 blanche. For more detailed information, read the manpages.