This can be changed with a simple command: Say Jacob moved a folder for Bethany into the SHARE directory – but Jacob still has ownership. Command line: File ownershipĬhanging the ownership of a file or folder is equally as simple.
If you have a number of sub-folders and files within the SHARE directory, and you want the permissions to apply from the parent object (the containing folder) to the child objects (the sub-folders and files), you must use the -R (recursive) switch so the same permissions are applied all the way to the deepest folder, contained within the parent. The permissions you can give to a file or folder are: The ‘other’ entry is the dangerous one, as it effectively gives everyone permission for the folder/file. The breakdown of permissions looks like this:
But we’re just using this for the purpose of demonstration. As I mentioned earlier, a more secure method would be to use groups. Ugo+rw – this gives User, Group, and Other read and write access.Īs you can probably surmise, this command opens wide the SHARE folder such that anyone on the system can have access to that folder. R – this modifies the permission of the parent folder and the child objects within Sudo – this is used to gain admin rights for the command on any system that makes use of sudo (otherwise you’d have to ‘su’ to root and run the above command without ‘sudo’)Ĭhmod – the command to modify permissions The breakdown of the above command looks like: One way to do this would be to issue the command: sudo chmod -R ugo+rw /DATA/SHARE If Bethany and Jacob are the only users on the system (and you know your network is safe – very important), you can change the permissions of the folder to give them access. There are a number of ways this can be done (one of which would be to join the users to a special group – we’ll go over managing groups in another post). Both users Bethany and Jacob need read and write access to this folder. For example:Ī new folder was created on a data partition called /DATA/SHARE. So, if you are user Bethany, you cannot make changes to files and folders owned by Jacob without the help of root (or sudo). It is important, however, that you understand the only user that can actually modify the permissions or ownership of a file is either the current owner or the root user. The commands for modifying file permissions and ownership are: So, we’ll start with the command line first. But before we get to the GUI, it’s always best to have a solid understanding of what it’s doing. That’s right, much to the surprise of many a new user, managing files and folders can be done from within the file managers. With the help of some of the most user-friendly desktop interfaces available, you can get away with little to no command line usage. Even with file permission and ownership. Although there is always far more power and flexibility to be had, running seemingly complicated command isn’t alwaysa necessity. It is commonly assumed, to get into this level of usage, the command line is a must. For many users of Linux, getting used to file permissions and ownership can be a bit of a challenge.