UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Alright, so a number of users are in a group, and they have certain access rights to a file, which is owned by a single user, standard stuff, right?

However, I need to know which user in that group was the last user to edit a file.

Is there any way to determine this in SunOS 5.9? I've looked high and low and have been absolutely stuck.

The simple answer, without turning on full auditing on the Solaris box is that you cant tell who updated the file.

Thank you so much.

That, I guess, changes my question to 'would it be possible to automatically change the owner of a file to whom ever last touched the file?'

I would put the file under rcs control. The file would normally be read-only. A particular user would check out the file for updating. When finished he checks the file back in and updates the read-only version. The check-in process records who is checking the file in and the user can even add a comment describing the change. Only one user can have have the file checked out for updating at a time, so there is no chance of two users stepping on each other. Did a user screw up the file? No problem, just check out an earlier version and install that. The only problem is that users need the discipline to use it.

Sun does not add rcs to Solaris by default but you can get it from Sunfreeware - Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for Sun Microsystem's Solaris. Solaris does have sccs which is an older package similiar to rcs. There are also more advanced packages out there like cvs. Stuff like this is how dozens of programmers can write an operating system without stepping on each other.

Ah, that would be lovely if we had a bunch of programers, but a large number of the people who we are worried about are struggling already with basic tasks like FTP.

I would also go down the revision control system route, however I would recommend a centralized server system , like subversion or cvs or perforce...
This would have the pro's that Perderabo was talking about, but the file could be available across the enterprise, cutting out the issues with FTP and other file transfer methods. It would give you a versioned file that you could tell who editted last, it can be rolled back, and most importantly the file can be accessed on any system, including using GUI clients. For example we have people in documentation that need to update html documentation on our product. They dont know, and dont wish to know unix. So they use a GUI client called "tortoise svn". This plugs into the Windows Explorer, and they just change the files naturally on windows using their favourite editors, etc. Once they have finished their editing they commit the changes and they're done. On the unix side, then when we build the product we drag these files in (the line endings are automatically mapped from CRLF to native line endings), and build the product. If we need to make changes, we can change the html files with the editor of our choice on UNIX and commit them when required. If we find an error introduced, we can look at the revisions, see when, where and who introduced them, and correct it, or roll back the version of the file. The files can then be centrally protected using passwords and access control, and it can be centrally backed up. We do this for every file we produce - code, images and documentation. I hope this helps...