Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Directory Permissions

Directories are also files under Linux. For example, again use the ls command to show permissions like this:

matthew@seymour:~$ mkdir directorymatthew@seymour:~$ ls -ld directorydrwxr-xr-x  2 matthew  matthew  4096 2010-06-30 13:23 directory

In this example, the mkdir command is used to create a directory. The ls command, and its -ld option, is used to show the permissions and other information about the directory (not its contents). Here you can see that the directory has permission values of 755 (read + write + execute or 4 + 2 + 1, read + execute or 4 + 1, and read + execute or 4 + 1).

This shows that the owner can read and write to the directory and, because of execute permission, also list the directory’s contents. ...