UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

When I checked to see who or what owns the files in my bin directory I noticed that some were owned by root while many others were owned by bin.

Should I be concerned that there are files in this directory owned by bin or is bin the same as root as it pertains to limiting access to the files in this directory?

Do you know about groups? bin comes from 'binary' and is used as the group for pre-installed files that come with Unix. IT is usually in the system group - low group number

Thanks for your reply....

I don't claim to understand all that there is to know about groups but I had a hunch that the files in the Bin group were particularly important and thus maay require an additonal level of access restrictions.

With all that in mind, I was expecting Root to be the owner of these files and am wondering if I should be concerned that bin owns about half of them......

No.
It is probably an artifact of "who" installed the files. As long as you don't grant ordinary users group access to "low" group numbers -groupids used by system accounts like root, bin, etc, it sounds fine to me.

The files you have to worry about are the ones marked setuid. You never want anyone to have the ability to write or to change those files. Except root. You may find the setuid files are all owned by root.