multi-user changes to grass

Anthony:

Please correct me if I missed something.
If you would like the users to store data sets in theirs home
directories, all you need to do is create new locations in their
home directories. Now, if there's a mapset all the users should be
able to access, create a symbolic link for PERMANENENT in their location
to the mapset of interest!

e.g. All the work that I do (e.g. maps etc that I create) is available to
rest of our users under their PERMANENT mapset. Any files that they create
would be stored under their $LOCATION/MAPSET in their home dirs.

PERMANENT -> /home/mlp/grass4.0/myimagery-u/mlp

--
Laxmi P. Musunur (LP) School of Forestry, Auburn University,
AUBURN AL 36849 E-mail: mlp@forestry.auburn.edu

Greetings,
     
     in our use of Grass here at James Cook University
(Australia), rather than having all the grass users (both students and
academic staff), storing their information under the grass data area, we
endeavoured to find a way in that the users' data could be stored in
their own areas, yet still be accessed in the normal way from grass. In
the end, a system by which the users' mapsets were symbolically linked
to a subdirectory under their own home directories.

  The system was implemented by modifying the grass shell script, and
also creating one small C program. This program should be setgid (set
group-id) to whatever user group the data is stored as. The location
directories' permissions should be set writable by the group. I will
append the relevant code below... We will most likely modify the xgrass
shell script in a similar manner.

  What we were wondering though, was if anybody else had come across a
similar situation, and if so, how they had handled it. We would love to
hear from you with any comments.

        Anthony.