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Different File Permissions Commands

Presentation · April 2020

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.30399.66721

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Different File Permissions
Commands

Dr. Nilu Singh

School of Computer Applications
Babu Banarasi Das University
Lucknow-UP
• Introduction
• umask Command
• df & du Command
• Sticky Bit
• ulimit command
• Find command
• Conclusion
 Introduction
• When user create a file or directory under
Unix/Linux, create it with a default set of
permissions.
• In most case the system defaults may be open or
relaxed for file sharing purpose.
For example, if a text file has 666 permissions, it
grants read and write permission to everyone.
Similarly a directory with 777 permissions, grants
read, write, and execute permission to everyone.
 Conti…
• Data are organized in files and directories-
 A file is a lump of data with a name. It also has
some metadata attached to it, like its permission
modes.
 A directory is actually a special file that simply
contains a list of files "in" this directory. Also
known as a folder, a directory can contain other
directories in a tree-like structure, and has the
same metadata as any other file.
 umask Command
• The user file-creation mode mask (umask) is use
to determine the file permission for newly created
files.
• It can be used to control the default file
permission for new files.
• It is a four-digit octal number. A umask can be set
or expressed using:
 Symbolic values
 Octal values
 Procedure To Setup Default umask
• You can setup umask
in /etc/bashrc or /etc/profile file for all users.
• By default most Linux distro set it to 0022 (022) or
0002 (002). Open /etc/profile or ~/.bashrc file, enter:
# vi /etc/profile
OR
$ vi ~/.bashrc
Append/modify following line to setup a new umask:
umask 022
Note: Save and close the file. Changes will take effect
after next login.
 Points to be remember
• A umask of 022 allows only you to write data,
but anyone can read data.
• A umask of 077 is good for a completely private
system. No other user can read or write your data
if umask is set to 077.
• A umask of 002 is good when you share data
with other users in the same group. Members of
your group can create and modify data files;
those outside your group can read data file, but
cannot modify it. Set your umask to 007 to
completely exclude users who are not group
members.
 How Do I Calculate umasks?
• The octal umasks are calculated by the bitwise AND of the
unary complement of the argument using bitwise NOT.
• The octal notations are as follows:
Octal value : Permission
0 : read, write and execute
1 : read and write
2 : read and execute
3 : read only
4 : write and execute
5 : write only
6 : execute only
7 : no permissions
 Conti…
Example: For example, if umask is set to 077, the
permission can be calculated as follows:
OR
 Chmod Command
• When you are the user, you can also set access
rights to the file.
• Permissions are assigned with the "chmod"
command.
• If you want to give write access to the group for
the file "file.txt", you can do
$ chmod g+w file.txt
$ ls -l file.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 bill geofag 79102 Jan 8 15:16 file.txt
 df Command
• df reports the amount of free disk space available
on each partition.

Du
Shows disk usage.
 Sticky Bit
• It was first introduced in in 1974 in the Unix
operating system.
• It was introduced to minimize the time delay
introduced every time when a program is
executed.
• A Sticky bit is a permission bit that is set on a file
or a directory that lets only the owner of the
file/directory or the root user to delete or rename
the file.
 Need of Sticky Bit
• There exists, for example, /tmp directory in the
Unix system that can be used by different Unix
users to create temporary files.
• Now, what if an user accidentally or deliberately
deletes (or rename) a file created by some other
user in this directory?
• To avoid these kind of issues, the concept of
sticky bit is used.
Example: Create a directory and provide all the
users read-write-execute access to it :
 Conti…

 So we see that a directory named ‘allAccess’ is

created and read-write-execute access to this
directory is given to all the users
through chmod command.
 Now, create multiple files in this directory (with
different users) such that all users have read-write-
execute access to them.
 Conti…
Example:

 The above file created by different users but have read-write-execute

access on for all the users. This means that the user ‘guest’ can delete or
rename the file created by user ‘guest-2’.
 In order to avoid this, sticky bit can be set on the directory allAccess.
 Conti…

As can be observed, a permission bit ‘t’ is introduced in the permission bits

of the directory.
 ulimit command
• ulimit (user limit) is used to display and set resources
limit for logged in user.
• When we run ulimit command with -a option then it will
print all resources’ limit for the logged in user.
• To display the individual resource limit then pass the
individual parameter in ulimit command, some of
parameters are listed below:
ulimit -n –> It will display number of open files limit
ulimit -c –> It display the size of core file
umilit -u –> It will display the maximum user process limit for the logged in user.
ulimit -f –> It will display the maximum file size that the user can have.
umilit -m –> It will display the maximum memory size for logged in user.
ulimit -v –> It will display the maximum memory size limit
 Conti…
• Use below commands check hard and soft limits
for number of open file for the logged in user-
 find command
• The find command in UNIX is a command line
utility for walking a file hierarchy.
• It can be used to find files and directories and
perform subsequent operations on them.
• It supports searching by file, folder, name,
creation date, modification date, owner and
permissions.
• By using the - exec other UNIX commands can
be executed on files or folders found.
 Conti…
Example:
find ./foo -name foo.txt
./foo/baz/foo.txt
find and delete a file
find ./foo -name foo.txt -delete
Conti…
 Conclusion
• Self help is the best help!
– Experiment.
• Links
– https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Guide_to_Unix/Command
s/File_System_Utilities
– https://tutonics.com/2012/12/linux-file-permissions-
chmod-umask.html
– https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/understanding-linux-unix-
umask-value-usage.html
– https://www.mn.uio.no/geo/english/services/it/help/usi
ng-linux/permissions.html
– https://www.thegeekstuff.com/2013/02/sticky-bit/
Books
– The UNIX programming environment, Kernighan & Pike
– Yashwant Kanetkar ―Unix Shell Progamming, BPB
 Thank You!

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