Linux Administration Cookbook

Hierarchical permissions

We created a directory, and a file in that directory, so let's take a quick look at understanding directory permissions.

To start, our permissiondir looks like this:

$ ls -la permissiondirtotal 0drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 45 Oct 28 12:37 .drwxr-xr-x. 5 root root 77 Oct 28 12:37 ..-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Oct 28 12:37 permissionfile-in-permissiondir

We can't currently rename this file, despite us wanting to, as it's too long:

$ mv permissiondir/permissionfile-in-permissiondir permissiondir/permissionfile2mv: cannot move 'permissiondir/permissionfile-in-permissiondir' to 'permissiondir/permissionfile2': Permission denied

So, let's set the write permission on this file for everyone:

$ sudo chmod 646 permissiondir/permissionfile-in-permissiondir ...