Permissions

Permissions are the other important part of the multiuser aspects of the filesystem. With these, you can change who can read, write, and execute files.

The permission information is stored as four octal digits, each specifying a different set of permissions. There are owner permissions, group permissions, and world permissions. The fourth octal digit is used to store special information such as set user ID, set group ID, and the “sticky” bit. The octal values assigned to the permission modes are (they also have letters associated with them that are displayed by programs such as ls and can be used by chmod):

You add the octal values for each permission group. For example, if you want the group permissions to be “read” and “write”, you would use “6” in the group portion of the permission information.

bash's default permissions are:

   $ ls -l /bin/bash
   -rwxr-xr-x   1 root     bin  477692 Mar 21 19:57 /bin/bash
   

The first dash would be replaced with a “d” if this was a directory. The three permission groups (owner, group, and world) are displayed next. We see that the owner has read, write, and execute permissions (rwx). The group has only read and execute (r-x). And everyone else has only read and execute (r-x).

How would we set permissions on another file to resemble bash's? First, let's make an example file:

   $ touch /tmp/example
   $ ls -l /tmp/example
   -rw-rw-r---  1 david    users    0 Apr 19 11:21 /tmp/example
   

We will use chmod(1) (which means “change mode”) to set the permissions on the example file. Add the octal numbers for the permissions you want. For the owner to have read, write, and execute, we would have a value of 7. Read and execute would have 5. Run those together and pass them to chmod like this:

   $ chmod 755 /tmp/example
   $ ls -l /tmp/example
   -rwxr-xr-x   1 david    users    0 Apr 19 11:21 /tmp/example
   

To set special permissions, add the numbers together and place them in the first column. For example, to make it set user ID and set group ID, we use 6 as the first column:

   $ chmod 6755 /tmp/example
   $ ls -l /tmp/example
   -rwsr-sr-x   1 david    users    0 Apr 19 11:21 /tmp/example
   

If the octal values confuse you, you can use letters with chmod. The permission groups are represented as:

To do the above, we would have to use several command lines:

   $ chmod a+rx /tmp/example
   $ chmod u+w /tmp/example
   $ chmod ug+s /tmp/example
   

Some people prefer the letters over the numbers. Either way will result in the same set of permissions.

We mentioned set user ID and set group ID permissions in several places above. You may be wondering what this is. Normally when you run a program, it is operating under your user account. That is, it has all the permissions that you as a user have. The same is true for the group. When you run a program, it executes under your current group. With set user ID permissions, you can force the program to always run as the program owner (such as “root”). Set group ID is the same, but for the group.

Be careful with this, set user ID and set group ID programs can open major security holes on your system. If you frequently set user ID programs that are owned by “root”, you are allowing anyone to run that program and run it as root. Since root has no restrictions on the system, you can see how this would pose a major security problem. In short, it's not bad to use set user ID and set group ID permissions, just use common sense.