Sooner or later it you will need to change access to a file or directory for the user (owner), group or other users. Often permissions are removed to restrict who can update or even view a file. Conversely you may want to grant more permissions to a file to encourage collaboration by allowing more people to view and edit files. It is also not unusual for an application to require specific permissions as a prerequisite for installation.
There are two methods of changing file permissions: with the abbreviations and with the numbers. Both have been described above, so now we’ll look at a couple examples of changing permissions using the chmod command.
The following example will demonstrate how to change permissions for the user (u), group (g), or others (o) using the alpha designations (r, w, x) for the permissions preceded by a + to add the permission or a – to remove the permission. Adding and removing permissions can be combined into a single command as we see below.
Using the chmod Command with Alpha Designations to Change File Permissions:
$ ls -l
total 12
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark authors 2229 Jan 13 21:35 declaration.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark presidents 1310 Jan 13 17:48 gettysburg.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark authors 360 Jan 13 17:48 preamble.txt
$ chmod o+w declaration.txt
$ ls -l
total 12
-rw-rw-rw- 1 tclark authors 2229 Jan 13 21:35 declaration.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark presidents 1310 Jan 13 17:48 gettysburg.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark authors 360 Jan 13 17:48 preamble.txt
$ chmod go-w declaration.txt
$ ls -l
total 12
-rw-r--r-- 1 tclark authors 2229 Jan 13 21:35 declaration.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark presidents 1310 Jan 13 17:48 gettysburg.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark authors 360 Jan 13 17:48 preamble.txt
The first example of the chmod command here adds write permission to the file declaration.txt for other users. We can see in the second ls –l the w indication in the second to last column of the permissions in the directory listing. This illustrates the typical format of the chmod command where you specify user (owner), group and/or other, + to add permissions or – to remove them and read, write and/or execute followed by the filename. Notice that there is not a space on either side of the + or – with the chmod command.
In the second example we revoke write from both the group and other users. This demonstrates that we can affect more than one level of permissions with a single chmod command. We see this change reflected in the permissions listed in the last ls listing.
The next example makes the same permission changes as the previous example, but this time numeric permission designations are used.
Using the chmod Command with Numeric Designations
$ ls -l
total 12
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark authors 2229 Jan 13 21:35 declaration.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark presidents 1310 Jan 13 17:48 gettysburg.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark authors 360 Jan 13 17:48 preamble.txt
$ chmod 666 declaration.txt
$ ls -l
total 12
-rw-rw-rw- 1 tclark authors 2229 Jan 13 21:35 declaration.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark presidents 1310 Jan 13 17:48 gettysburg.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark authors 360 Jan 13 17:48 preamble.txt
$ chmod 644 declaration.txt
$ ls -l
total 12
-rw-r--r-- 1 tclark authors 2229 Jan 13 21:35 declaration.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark presidents 1310 Jan 13 17:48 gettysburg.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 tclark authors 360 Jan 13 17:48 preamble.txt
Here we see the 666 mode being used to indicate that read (designated as 4) and write (designated as 2) but not execute (designated as 1) are combined (4+2+0=6) to grant read and write permissions to user, group and other. We then used the 644 mode to change the permissions so the owner could still read and write, but the group and other could only read.
It can be quicker to modify multiple permissions using the numeric designations but they tend to be much harder to remember. Using the abbreviations you can also easily change the group permissions, for example, without affecting the user or other permissions. The –R (recursive) option is also available for the chmod command allowing you to modify permissions on a directory and its contents. This should be done with caution as it is easy to lock lots of people out of files and directories, including yourself.
These permissions have a special meaning when applied to directories. Next week I’ll go over how these differ from files.
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unix, linux, system administration, sysadmin, security, file security, permissions, owner, group
