File Security Model Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

In Linux, every file and every directory has a user of the system that is the owner of the file or directory. Each file and directory also has a security group associated with it that has access rights to the file or directory. If you are neither the file/directory owner nor assigned to the security group for the file, you are classified as ‘other’ and may still have certain rights to access the file as we shall learn.

Each of the three file access categories (owner, group, other) has a set of three access permissions associated with it. The access permissions are read, write, and execute. You will recall from the discussions about file and directory commands that using the –l option with the ls command, will display the file and directory permissions as well as the owner and group as demonstrated below:

File Permissions, Owner, & Group
$ ls -l
total 12
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark authors 2229 Jan 13 21:35
declaration.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark authors 1310 Jan 13 17:48
gettysburg.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark authors 360 Jan 13 17:48
preamble.txt
$

The above book excerpt is from:

Easy Linux Commands
Working Examples of Linux Command Syntax

ISBN: 0-9759135-0-6   

Terry Clark