Spring Into Linux®

Managing Owners and Groups

Permissions to your files are given to the owner, the group, or all accounts. You may want to transfer a file you created to another owner. More often, you want to change the group for a file as a way of allowing specific users to access it.

On many systems, when a file is created, the group for the file is the same name as the owner who created it. For instance, a file created by janet may belong to the janet group. If you give permissions on the file to other accounts by adding them to the janet group, you allow them access to all files you create. A better solution is to create a new group, add the members you want to be able to access the file to the new group, and change the group for the file. Then, if you give ...