UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I understand the permissions of a file/directory.
I just needs to understand how ownership works. Can some one help me on this please?

Thanks in advance.

ownership is intimately linked to permission...
permissions (you understand...) are given to 3 categories (have not found better explanation for now...):
owner
group
other
all files/directories are owned by someone, belong to a group, and have set permission for others
This allows to fine tune who has access and how to the given directory/file

For instance your history file is personal => perms are rwx------, you are the owner and the group you see you belong to is most certainly your default: GID

And only the owner of a file may use chmod/chown to alter a file's permissions/ownership and use chgrp to change it to a group of which he is a mermber.

You can read from this link too...
Learning the shell - Lesson 7: Permissions

Hello Unix community. I have a follow-up question about ownership and permissions. I am new to Unix too. In fact, I am not a programmer but an auditor. So you might say I really don't know anything! I was given the following as an answer to one of my questions. Can someone translate this in plain english for me please?

NewBREW#l /etc/su*
-r-x------ 1 root root 3560 Jan 11 2003 /etc/suds_ctrl@
NewBREW#

If that was the answer to your question, it might help if you told us what the qestion was!

Read and execute for owner. The @ probably means it's a symbolic link. If that was your question

you are missing an 's -la' I believe, perhaps you did not copy it all? it should look like

Code:

ls -la /etc/su*
-r-x------ 1 root root 3560 Jan 11 2003 /etc/suds_ctrl@

The ls says to list /etc/su* is a "glob" which means list any files in the /etc directory that beginning with su. In this case, the suds_ctrl file is owned by root and can only be executed (or read) by root. It is possible that the l command was an alias for ls -la.