[WEB4LIB] Re: LINUX on a public workstation reprise

[Richard L. Goerwitz III]

Kay McCoy wrote:

> > You should be able to have a single file in the directory be open to write
> > globally, while the directory itself is only writable by root.
> >
> My co-worker says "it doesn't work"  - if you can't write to a directory as
> user, you can't write to a file in that directory as user.

That's not strictly correct.  I don't know how relevant this is to the
list as a whole, but I suspect if you're running into confusion here,
others will, too.  So a posting to the list seems warranted.

In order to write to a file in a directory, you don't have to have
write permissions on the directory itself, just the file.  You also
need permission to 'cd' into the directory (for techies, that's bit
1; in octal, then, you'll need the directory to have at least 0711
permissions; 0755 or 0775 is more appropriate, though, probably).

Here's one strategy; please make sure you understand what these com-
mands all do, and tailor them to your setup:

  1) cd ~user (cd to the home directory of user)
  2) chown -R root.root . (make root own everything in that directory)
  3) find . -type d -exec chmod 2775 {} \; -print
  4) chgrp user file-you-want-user-to-write-to
  5) chmod g+w file-you-want-user-to-write-to

-- 

Richard Goerwitz                               richard at Goerwitz.COM
tel: 401 438 8978