Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE DESKTOP 10 SP2 - DEPLOYMENT GUIDE 08-05-2008 Deployment Manual page 380

in a Linux system is a member of at least one proprietary group, normally users.
There can be as many groups in a system as needed, but only root is able to add
groups. Every user can find out, with the command groups, of which groups he is a
member.
File Access
The organization of permissions in the file system differs for files and directories.
File permission information can be displayed with the command ls -l. The
output could appear as in
(page 364).
Example 15.1 Sample Output Showing File Permissions
-rw-r----- 1 tux project3 14197 Jun 21
As shown in the third column, this file belongs to user tux. It is assigned to the
group project3. To discover the user permissions of the Roadmap file, the first
column must be examined more closely.
-
Type
This column consists of one leading character followed by nine characters grouped
in threes. The first of the ten letters stands for the type of file system component.
The hyphen (–) shows that this is a file. A directory (d), a link (l), a block device
(b), or a character device could also be indicated.
The next three blocks follow a standard pattern. The first three characters refer to
whether the file is readable (r) or not (–). A w in the middle portion symbolizes
that the corresponding object can be edited and a hyphen (–) means it is not possible
to write to the file. An x in the third position denotes that the object can be executed.
Because the file in this example is a text file and not one that is executable, exe-
cutable access for this particular file is not needed.
In this example, tux has, as owner of the file Roadmap, read (r) and write access
(w) to it, but cannot execute it (x). The members of the group project3 can read
the file, but they cannot modify it or execute it. Other users do not have any access
364 Deployment Guide
Example 15.1, "Sample Output Showing File Permissions"
rw-
Users Permissions
15:03 Roadmap
r--
Group Permissions
---
Permissions for Other
Users