Inside Solaris™ 9

Controlling File Access

After you have established login restrictions, you need to control access to the data on the system. Some users only need to look at files; others need the ability to change or delete files. You might have data that you do not want anyone else to see. You control data access by assigning permission levels to a file or directory.

Three levels of access permission are assigned to a UNIX file to control access by the owner, the group, and all others. Display permissions with the ls -la command. The following example shows the use of the ls -la command to display permissions on files in the /users directory:

ls -la    /users 

The system responds with this:

 drwxr-xr-x 2 bill staff 512 Sep 23 07:02 . drwxr-xr-x ...