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## java.security.acl
Interface Group

All Superinterfaces:
  Principal

public interface Group
extends Principal

This interface is used to represent a group of principals. (A principal represents an entity such as an individual user or a company).

Note that Group extends Principal. Thus, either a Principal or a Group can be passed as an argument to methods containing a Principal parameter. For example, you can add either a Principal or a Group to a Group object by calling the object's `addMember` method, passing it the Principal or Group.

Method Summary
`boolean` | `addMember(Principal user)` Adds the specified member to the group.
`boolean` | `isMember(Principal member)` Returns true if the passed principal is a member of the group.
`Enumeration` | `members()` Returns an enumeration of the members in the group.
`boolean` | `removeMember(Principal user)` Removes the specified member from the group.

Methods inherited from interface java.security.Principal
`equals, getName, hashCode, toString`

Method Detail

### addMember

    public boolean addMember(Principal user)

  Adds the specified member to the group.

  Parameters:
    `user` - the principal to add to this group.
  Returns:
    true if the member was successfully added, false if the principal was already a member.

### removeMember

    public boolean removeMember(Principal user)

  Removes the specified member from the group.

  Parameters:
    `user` - the principal to remove from this group.
  Returns:
    true if the principal was removed, or false if the principal was not a member.

### isMember

    public boolean isMember(Principal member)

  Returns true if the passed principal is a member of the group. This method does a recursive search, so if a principal belongs to a group which is a member of this group, true is returned.

  Parameters:
    `member` - the principal whose membership is to be checked.
  Returns:
    true if the principal is a member of this group, false otherwise.

### members

    public Enumeration members()

  Returns an enumeration of the members in the group. The returned objects can be instances of either Principal or Group (which is a subclass of Principal).

  Returns:
    an enumeration of the group members.

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For further API reference and developer documentation, see Java 2 SDK SE Developer Documentation. That documentation contains more detailed, developer-targeted descriptions, with conceptual overviews, definitions of terms, workarounds, and working code examples.

Copyright 2002 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Use is subject to license terms.