<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Robert Dailey wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:496954360806301541m29afb4evc6206256728e945a@mail.gmail.com" type="cite">I have a question also about basic file permissions. Keep in mind I've been in Microsoft land for all my life, and I realize you guys get pretty pissed off when I refer to linux stuff using Windows terminology. However I hope you'll bear with me, I'm still learning. >From what I can tell, each file or directory on the system can have a user AND a group associated with it. This doesn't make much sense to me. If I'm user 'foo', and I have a group named 'test' which I am in, and I assign the following to a file: USER: foo GROUP: test I've technically been added to this file 2 times, so which permissions does the system choose for me? The ones from the group that I'm in, or the user permissions? It would make more sense to add *only* groups to files and directories, things would seem more consistent that way. I don't see a point in just assigning a single user as a special case, when all you really need to do is assign a group with only 1 user in it. </blockquote> Each user can be in more than one group user foo can be in group test, and also group help for example, using that you can allow people access to subsystems as necessary. Using user access you can prevent access to any files for anyone except owner. Classic Unix permissions can be read write and execute. There are thee sets of permission for each file user, group and other. There are represented as rwxrwxrwx so a hierarchy of access can be arranged. The user (owner) may have read write and execute permissions and the group may have read and execute permission which everyone else can be completely excluded from access. that would show up in the listing rwxr-x--- That is a very simple overview. I hope it helps <div class="moz-signature">-- <meta http-equiv="CONTENT-TYPE" content="text/html; "> <title></title> <meta name="GENERATOR" content="OpenOffice.org 2.0 (Win32)"> <meta name="AUTHOR" content="Robert Steinmetz"> <meta name="CREATED" content="20060218;16424951"> <meta name="CHANGEDBY" content="Robert Steinmetz"> <meta name="CHANGED" content="20060425;18531026"> <style>  </style>Robert Steinmetz, AIA Principal Steinmetz & Associates </div> </body> </html>