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File system basics: Permissions 101

File system basics: Permissions 101 - Linux Tutorial

From the course: Linux Tips

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File system basics: Permissions 101

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- [Instructor] Linux is a multi-user operating system, and that means that we need a way to secure a user's files, or the system files, from access by other users. The way this is done on Linux is through the use of permissions. Every file on a Linux system has information about who owns it, which we can see in a long listing here. This ownership information consists of a user and a group. These values can be changed as needed, with the chown and chgroup commands. And they form the basis of the POSIX permission scheme. The permission scheme lets us determine who has the ability to access a file to read from it, to write to it, or to execute it based on three criteria. Whether a user is the owner of the file, whether the user is in a group which has ownership of the file, or whether a user is neither. In this listing, those conditions are indicated here in a line of nine characters. Divided into three groups. The first group of three characters after the type represent the ability of…

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