The Linux Command Line

Reading, Writing, and Executing

Access rights to files and directories are defined in terms of read access, write access, and execution access. If we look at the output of the ls command, we can get some clue as to how this is implemented:

[me@linuxbox ˜]$ > foo.txt
[me@linuxbox ˜]$ ls -l foo.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me    me   0 2012-03-06 14:52 foo.txt

The first 10 characters of the listing are the file attributes (see Figure 9-1). The first of these characters is the file type. Table 9-1 lists the file types you are most likely to see (there are other, less common types too).

Figure 9-1. Breakdown of file attributes

The remaining nine characters of the file attributes, ...