Specifies that all files created by CIFS users in a share belong to the same group, which must be a predefined group in the UNIX group database. The group you specify is called a forcegroup.
Specifying a forcegroup causes the following restrictions:
All files in this share created by CIFS users belong to the same forcegroup, regardless of the GID of the file owner.
CIFS users who access this share are temporarily changed to the GID of the forcegroup. This GID enables them to access files in this share that are not accessible normally with their primary GID.
Using a forcegroup makes it easier to ensure that files can be accessed by CIFS users belonging to various groups. For example, if you want to create a share to store the company's Web pages that can be written by users in Engineering and Marketing, you could create a share with a forcegroup named web. Because of the forcegroup, all files created by CIFS users in this share are owned by the web group when accessing the share. As a result, they can write to this share without your managing the access rights of the Engineering and Marketing groups.
If the share is used in a multiprotocol environment, the forcegroup does not affect how NFS users access files in this share. Files created by NFS users acquire the GID in the users' GID. In addition, when CIFS users attempt to access files created by NFS users, the CIFS users' primary GID is used to determine access rights.
Note: There is no need to use forcegroups for shares created in an NTFS-style qtree because access to files in these shares is determined by Windows permissions, not GIDs.