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...