Shell Programming and Scripting

Normal file permissions are enough to do what you want.

Add both users to a group of your choosing. Make a new group if you want using groupadd.

User one does this:

Code:

chown :groupname file1 file2 file3
chmod g+r file1 file2 file3

The 'chmod' is probably optional, group-read may be set by default anyway.

User two will be able to read file1, file2, file3 without being root.

It's also possible to make a directory whose files will belong to a particular group by default:

Code:

$ mkdir directory
$ chown :groupname directory
$ chmod g+s directory
$ touch directory/asdf
$ ls -l directory
-rw-r--r-- 1 username groupname 0 Sep 13 18:03 123

As long as they don't create subdirectories inside it, files in it should always be accessible to anyone in groupname.

This is why they're so heavily discouraging using root: It isn't just dangerous and insecure, it's generally unnecessary. The only thing of all of that which needed elevated access was groupadd, which only needs running once.