Remove all group members

Steve Hall

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Sep 13, 2011, 10:12:21 AM9/13/11

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Is there a way to remove all members of a group using GAM? I'm building a solution to re-fresh a series of groups from an external database. Rather than retrieve all the existing members, then send individual commands to remove each of them, then add all the new members, I was hoping I could send a single command to remove all existing members. Is this possible?

Steve

Sreejith Menon

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Sep 13, 2011, 10:17:53 AM9/13/11

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The best available option will be, provided your custom solution doesn't conflict is to delete the group and re-create it. Just 2 commands. What do you say?

Regards,

Sreejith Menon

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 6:12 PM, Steve Hall <steve...@tyngsboroughps.org> wrote:

Is there a way to remove all members of a group using GAM? I'm building a solution to re-fresh a series of groups from an external database. Rather than retrieve all the existing members, then send individual commands to remove each of them, then add all the new members, I was hoping I could send a single command to remove all existing members. Is this possible?

Steve

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Jay Lee

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Sep 13, 2011, 10:20:01 AM9/13/11

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Hi Steve,

There is no single command to remove all users from a group. I think you'd be best of to:

use "gam info group nnnn" to get a list of all current group members.
have your custom script diff that list against the database and create a list of users to be added and users to be removed.
have GAM add/remove the users as needeed to sync up with the group.

dropping all members from a group and re-adding them would be much slower and problematic for the users themselves.

Jay

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Jay Lee

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 7:12 AM, Steve Hall <steve...@tyngsboroughps.org> wrote:

Is there a way to remove all members of a group using GAM? I'm building a solution to re-fresh a series of groups from an external database. Rather than retrieve all the existing members, then send individual commands to remove each of them, then add all the new members, I was hoping I could send a single command to remove all existing members. Is this possible?

Steve

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Jay Lee

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Sep 13, 2011, 10:23:48 AM9/13/11

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I'm not sure I'd recommend deleting the group each time either since that would lose ALL of the group's settings and many of those settings can't be set via the API and GAM right now.

Jay
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Jay Lee

Steve Hall

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Sep 13, 2011, 10:33:31 AM9/13/11

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I thought about that. The issue is that the groups have lots of special configurations which cannot be set via GAM (i.e. everything under the "Access", "Email delivery", and "Advanced" tabs). According to the GAM docs...

"...additional groups security settings are available but cannot be set by GAM, this is a Google limitation"

Steve

Steve Hall

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Sep 13, 2011, 10:35:23 AM9/13/11

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This is my existing strategy.

Steve

Sreejith Menon

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Sep 13, 2011, 10:45:07 AM9/13/11

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Oki. Great.....All the very best !

Regards,

Sreejith Menon

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Steve Hall

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Sep 13, 2011, 10:49:43 AM9/13/11

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I should have said "This is my existing strategy, but I would still prefer to remove all members in one operation then send the add commands." With the existing strategy, I have to script the retrieval of existing names, parse the results, then do the adds...it's just more work. There are times when I just want to wipe out all the members.

Steve

Moti Levy

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Sep 13, 2011, 11:23:44 AM9/13/11

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You can use a simple bash loop:

for u in `gam info group YOURGROUP | egrep "Member|Owner" | cut -d: -f2` ; do echo "removing $u" ; gam update group YOURGROUP delete $u ;done

Moti

Jefferson Davis

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Jun 27, 2016, 6:21:51 PM6/27/16

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OR

for u in `/opt/GAM/gam.py info group <yourgroup> | grep "member: " | sed 's/member: //g' | sed 's/(user)//g'` ; do /opt/GAM/gam.py update group <yourgroup> remove user $u ;done

I may need to take into account owner/manager account status, or remove the parentheses and anything between them.

I suspect some aspects of GAM have been updated since your post.

On Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 8:23:44 AM UTC-7, Moti Levy wrote:

You can use a simple bash loop:

for u in `gam info group YOURGROUP | egrep "Member|Owner" | cut -d: -f2` ; do echo "removing $u" ; gam update group YOURGROUP delete $u ;done

Moti

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Steve Hall <steve...@tyngsboroughps.org> wrote:

I should have said "This is my existing strategy, but I would still prefer to remove all members in one operation then send the add commands." With the existing strategy, I have to script the retrieval of existing names, parse the results, then do the adds...it's just more work. There are times when I just want to wipe out all the members.

Steve

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 10:35 AM, Steve Hall <steve...@tyngsboroughps.org> wrote:

This is my existing strategy.

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Ross Scroggs

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Jun 28, 2016, 2:56:20 AM6/28/16

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Jefferson,

I've added an option to GAM to allow removing members from groups by role.

gam update groups <Group> clear [owner] [manager] [member]

If you don't specify an option after clear, the members are cleared.

I've submitted a pull request to Jay to include this in his version of GAM,

in the meantime, go here to check it out: https://github.com/taers232c/GAM/releases/tag/v3.66

Ross

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Bryan Guidroz

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Jul 15, 2016, 4:23:12 PM7/15/16

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Clearing a group would be great!

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Ross Scroggs

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Jul 15, 2016, 5:01:35 PM7/15/16

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Bryan,

By "Clearing a group would be great!" do you mean clearing everyone out of the group?

If so, say: gam update group <Group> clear owner manager member

You can specify multiple roles.

(n.b., in my first response I incorrectly said: "gam update groups", it is group singular.)

Available here: https://github.com/taers232c/GAM/releases/tag/v3.66

Ross

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Rahulendra Bhaskar

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Jul 4, 2024, 6:50:20 AM7/4/24

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Dear All,

This tested command would be useful for someone-

gam update group <grp name> remove group <grp name>

Ross Scroggs

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Jul 4, 2024, 10:19:44 AM7/4/24

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This will remove all the users in <grp name2> (as individual members) from <grp name1>.

gam update group <grp name1> remove group <grp name2>

If you want to remove <grp name2> as a member from <grp name1> do:

gam update group <grp name1> remove <grp name2>

Ross

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