Book Image

Linux Mint Essentials

By : Jay LaCroix
Book Image

Linux Mint Essentials

By: Jay LaCroix

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Linux Mint Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding file and directory permissions


The last section of this chapter deals with a very important concept that we haven't touched on so far. Permissions in Linux are handled very differently than those on the Windows platform, but Mac users may already understand these concepts as they are very similar.

While using the Linux shell, you may have noticed funny characters next to file names. For example, when entering ls -l into the shell while in a directory that contains files, you may see the following output:

drwxr-xr-x   2 jdoe     users   4096 Dec 24 14:10 Documents
drwxr-xr-x   4 bsmith   users   4096 Dec 31 13:54 Movies
drwxr-xr-x  11 root     root   4096 Dec 24 14:11 Private

Before diving into permissions, let's explore the output of the ls -l command so that you understand each section. The first section contains the permission string for each file or folder. We'll get into this shortly. Next to the permission string, you'll see a number. This number contains the link count...