Directory access

• Welcome to linuxzoo
  • Essential Linux
    • Unix Security
      • Directory access

Directory access has the same three classes of ownership as files; owner, group, and other. Directory permissions however have slightly different meanings from those of files.

• r - read permission - enables users to look at which files and directories are contained within a directory i.e. to use an 'ls -l' within that directory.
• w - write permission - enables users to create, rename, or remove files contained within that directory.
• x - execute permission - this enables users to cd to that directory, search for files, and use it within path names for commands. If a user does not have execute permission on a directory this automatically denies the user access to all subdirectories.

For example:

% ls -ld projects
drwxr-xr--.  1  john   staff 1032 Nov 18 12:25   projects

The "d" in the flag list is very important. The default behaviour of the "ls" command when asked to consider a directory is to show the CONTENTS of a directory rather than information on the directory itself. If you need the ls command to tell you about a directory entry rather than the contents of a directory you MUST use "-d".

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