Quick Start Guide

6.3.1 Permissions for User, Group and Others
Three permission sets are dened for each le object on a Linux system. These sets
include the read, write, and execute permissions for each of three types of users—the
owner, the group, and other users. You can view and change the access permissions
of a le or folder in the le managers of your desktop or in a shell (see Section 7.5,
“Modifying File Permissions” (page 94)).
Figure 6.4 File Access Permissions in KDE File Manager
The following example shows the output of an ls -l command in a shell. This com-
mand lists the contents of a directory and shows the details for each le and folder
in that directory.
Example 6.1 Access Permissions For Files and Folders
-rw-r----- 1 tux users 0 2006-06-23 16:08 checklist.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 tux users 53279 2006-06-21 13:16 gnome_quick.xml
-rw-rw---- 1 tux users 0 2006-06-23 16:08 index.htm
-rw-r--r-- 1 tux users 70733 2006-06-21 09:35 kde-start.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 tux users 47896 2006-06-21 09:46 kde_quick.xml
drwxr-xr-x 2 tux users 48 2006-06-23 16:09 local
-r-xr-xr-x 1 tux users 624398 2006-06-23 15:43 tux.jpg
As shown in the third column, all objects belong to user tux. They are assigned to
the group users which is the primary group the user tux belongs to. To retrieve the
access permissions the rst column of the list must be examined more closely. Let's
have a look at the le kde-start.xml:
82 Start-Up