I come from a Novell, OS/2, Windows background. My experience comes
from that arena.
As per the subject my questions are about permissions, users and groups.
I've read tons of stuff and think I've got a pretty good handle on file
or directory permissions. My questions are a bit more esoteric.
============= Subdirectory Permissions ==============================
In Novell permissions could be assigned to a "parent" directory and it
automatically applied to all files and subdirectories. This was called
inheritance. It was automatic and you could change the permissions of a
subdirectory if you'd like. It sort of looked from the top of the tree
down to determine the actual permissions in effect.
In OS/2 / Windows you didn't have this. Instead your changes only
applied to wherever you assigned them. However, you did have the option
of "applying" the permissions. This could be quite dangerous. Let's
say you went to the root (d:\) directory and made it universally
read/write. Well if you applied this it would erase any existing
permissions in any subdirectory and replace them with the "new"
settings.
I gather that Linux doesn't have any sort of inheritance and matches the
OS/2 Windows model (which is good). It seems that the -R switch will
allow you to "Apply" the permissions change to subdirectories. Do I
have this right?
============= Groups to manage access ==============================
I need to understand how to use groups better. Let's build two
subdirectories. /shared and /accounting. Where they are is
irrelevant. In my past I'd have a group called "everybody" with every
user on the system in it. If I want to give access to /shared to
everybody it seems all I'd have to do is assign the group everybody to
the /shared subdirectory. So, assuming root made it, it would look like
(read/write to root and "everybody", nothing to others):
ls -al /shared
drw-rw---- 19 root everybody 4096 Aug 8
11:01
Likewise I want to restrict /accounting to members of the accounting
department. I build a group called accounting and only the members of
the accounting department will be in that group. It would look like:
ls -al /accounting
drw-rw---- 19 root accounting 4096 Aug 8
11:01
Finally, how would I handle multiple groups? For example I'd like the
auditors to be able to only have read access. In my past I'd simply
assign multiple groups to the subdirectories but I don't see how to do
this, in this environment, or at least to give more than one set of
permissions. I don't want to open it up to read for everybody.
=====================
Thanks for any feedback.
**********************************************************
To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the
*body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter:
unsubscribe gnhlug
**********************************************************
