Getting Started with Fluidinfo

Chapter 8. Advanced Use of the Fluidinfo Shell

Chapter 2 provided an introduction to the Fluidinfo Shell (Fish) and an overview of its key commands. We now expand on this. We begin by looking at how to interrogate Fluidinfo’s permissions system in more detail using the -G option to the ls command. We then discuss how Fish can be used to set more complex configurations of permissions using the -X option to the perms command. Finally, we introduce the -l and -g flags available with the ls command, which allow more compact and Unix-like “long” listings of tags and namespaces.

Permissions in Depth

As mentioned in Chapter 2, the view of permissions presented so far is a simplification. Fluidinfo in fact maintains several write permissions for tags and namespaces, and also two different control permissions for tags. Because the various write permissions are normally set identically, as are the control positions, this is not usually important. But in the minority of instances where this is not the case, the extra controls add considerable flexibility. If you don’t care about the detail, you can safely skip the rest of this section.

In Chapter 2, we saw that ordinarily, the ls -L command produces output like this:

$ fish ls -Ld /alice /alice/rating alice/: read: policy: open; exceptions = [] write: policy: closed; exceptions = [alice] control: policy: closed; exceptions = [alice] alice/rating: read: policy: open; exceptions = [] write: policy: closed; exceptions = [alice] control: policy: closed; ...