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Managing File and Directory Permissions

If you’re the administrator of the system, or if you can run the sudo command, you can change the permissions on files and directories anywhere on your system.

The files structure you made in your home directory is something other users on the machine could use, so let’s copy the structure into the /var directory so others can access it. Use the sudo command since you don’t have write access to the var directory:

$ sudo cp -r ~/files /var/files

Next, get a long listing of the /var/files directory, showing all hidden files. This lets you view the permissions of the /var/files directory itself:

$ ls -alh /var/files
total 32K
drwxr-xr-x  8 root root 4.0K Mar  2 13:25 .