Solaris™ Operating Environment Boot Camp

Setting Permissions

The permissions of all the files in the system would normally be set by the system administrator to fit in with the site security policy (which all sites should have). We will be looking at how to define default permissions to new files that are created, but first we will look at how to alter the permissions of an existing file.

The first thing we need to know is that only the owner of a file (or root) can change the permissions of a file, and the command we use is chmod (which is short for “change mode” as a file's permissions can also be referred to as its mode). There are two ways that the permissions of a file may be changed with chmod. The first uses absolute syntax and the second symbolic syntax.

Consider the following ...