Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

The shell remains one of the most powerful tools on a computer system — yet a large number of users are unaware of how much one can accomplish with it. Using a combination of simple commands, we will see how to solve complex problems in day to day computer usage.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition will take you through useful real-world recipes designed to make your daily life easy when working with the shell. The book shows the reader how to effectively use the shell to accomplish complex tasks with ease.The book discusses basics of using the shell, general commands and proceeds to show the reader how to use them to perform complex tasks with ease.Starting with the basics of the shell, we will learn simple commands with their usages allowing us to perform operations on files of different kind. The book then proceeds to explain text processing, web interaction and concludes with backups, monitoring and other sysadmin tasks.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition serves as an excellent guide to solving day to day problems using the shell and few powerful commands together to create solutions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Working with file permissions, ownership, and the sticky bit


File permissions and ownership are one of the distinguishing features of the Unix/Linux filesystems such as extfs (extended FS). In many circumstances while working on Unix/Linux platforms, we come across issues related to permissions and ownership. This recipe is a walk through the different use cases of these.

In Linux systems, each file is associated with many types of permissions. Out of these permissions, three sets of permissions (user, group, and others) are commonly manipulated.

The user is the owner of the file. The group is the collection of users (as defined by the system administrator) that are permitted some access to the file. Others are any entities other than the user or group owner of the file.

Permissions of a file can be listed by using the ls -l command:

-rw-r--r-- 1 slynux slynux  2497  2010-02-28 11:22 bot.py
drwxr-xr-x 2 slynux slynux  4096  2010-05-27 14:31 a.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 slynux slynux  539   2010-02...