FreeBSD® Unleashed

File Ownership

This brings us to our file ownership model. All UNIXes have the same kind of ownership structure: Every file and directory is owned by both a user and a group. However, as you will see in a moment, this does not necessarily mean that either the user or the members of the group have any particular permissions to access the file or directory.

Let's take a look at the permissions and ownership details of a set of files (see Listing 10.1). Use the -l option to ls to give a detailed listing, and the -a option to show all files, including “hidden” ones (whose names begin with a dot):

Listing 10.1. Set of Files Showing Ownership and Permissions

# ls -la /home/frank total 3126 drwxr-xr-x 3 frank users 512 May 12 2000 . drwxr-xr-x 52 root ...