Linux Administration Cookbook

Introduction

In the early days, way back in the mists of the 90s, Linux didn't have a great deal in terms of access control...then came permissions and attributes. Permissions and attributes are the elements of a file that dictate what access the system and users have to that file (or folder), and what it's capable of doing to the file in terms of interaction. At a basic level, you use ls to view information on permissions (more on this later), but for now, see the following example:

$ ls -l .total 0-rw-rw-r--. 1 vagrant vagrant 0 Oct 28 10:42 examplefile

In this chapter, we will learn about permissions from the basic Linux offerings, to SELinux and AppArmor. We'll also look at troubleshooting issues that might be caused by SELinux or AppArmor. ...