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A lot of Linux/openSUSE users aren’t aware that there are more to file system permissions than the obvious Owner, Group, Other / Read, Write, Execute setup.

All major Linux file systems (ext3, reiserfs, etc) support access control lists (ACL) and its very easy to use them.

To see if a file or directory has an ACL set on it, you can use ls:

inspidell:~ # ls -ld /home/sontek

You’ll get output similar to this:

drwxr-xr-x+ 55 sontek users 4096 Jul  4 13:42 /home/sontek

The + at the end of the permissions means that we are using extended permissions (ACL’s). To get the list of ACL’s on the file/directory, run the getfacl <file> command.

inspidell:~ # getfacl /home/sontek
getfacl: Removing leading '/' from absolute path names
# file: home/sontek
# owner: sontek
# group: users
user::rwx
group::r-x
other::r-x
default:user::rwx
default:group:users:---
default:mask::r-x
default:other::r-x

This shows both the ACL’s and the basic Linux permissions.

To modify or set ACL’s you use the setfacl command. Here are a few examples of how to use it:

Grant a single user read access to a directory in your home directory.
setfacl -m u:mom:r /home/sontek/photos

Remove all access from a group on a file
setfacl -x g:developers payroll.xml

You can also copy a set of permissions from one file to another
getfacl file1 | setfacl --set-file=- file2

Remove all ACL’s
setfacl -k /home/sontek

For those of you who are not console jockey’s, you’ll realize quickly that the default nautilus setup doesn’t have a way to view, modify, or add any ACL’s, to get this support you’ll need to install two packages, with opensuse you do this with zypper:

inspidell:~ # zypper in eiciel nautilus-eiciel

Before the ACL permissions show up in nautilus, you’ll have to restart it:

inspidell:~ # pkill nautilus

After this, you’ll be greeted with a very easy to use dialog for modifying ACL’s:

another great nautilus permissions tip I learned from Christer Edwards is to enable advanced permissions in nautilus, this is a much better UI for managing permissions and should probably be the default.

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_advanced_permissions True

A screenshot of this in action:

I hope this helps you better secure and manage your computer with the more advanced features your Linux file systems both from console and inside GNOME.