What is Primary Group Authority?

Primary group authority was created to accommodate the concept of group authority in UNIX. It was added to OS/400 when IBM added support for the Integrated File System (IFS). All of these functions were added to facilitate porting UNIX applications to run on OS/400. Primary group authority can only be given to a group profile and only one group profile can be an object’s primary group.

Primary group authority is similar to a private authority granted to a group profile. The biggest difference is the primary group and its authority are stored in object’s header (versus with the user profile for private authorities).

Primary group authority is checked before any private authorities the group may have; therefore, we’ll see a slight performance gain when using primary group authority. The gain is so small it’s not worth the time it would take to change our security configuration