Cody Richardson

  Reading File Permissions Linux file permissions are broken down by User, Group, and Others. Permissions for read, write, and execute can be associated with each entity and are displayed as rwxrwxrwx. As an example, take alternatives.log  -- the first entry shown in the screenshot above. The file is owned by the root user and the root group. It's permissions are set as -rw-r--r--.  The first "-" we're going to ignore for now, and we'll focus on the rw- r-- r-- section. The can be interpreted as root (the user) can read and write this file, but not execute. Root (the group) can only read this file. Finally, others, which means anyone not the user or group, can only read the file. Now that we can check the file permissions, what if we need to change them? First we'll change the user and group that owns the file, then we'll come back to the permissions. Changing File Ownership First, any given file or directory can have the owner user and group changed ...