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File Management Paper - Unix File Permissions

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File Management Paper – Unix® File Permissions Joe Guckiean POS/355 April 15, 2013 Bob O'Connor File Management Paper – Unix® File Permissions The name Unix® refers to a play on words rather than being an acronym. During the mid-1960 an operating system was developed at MIT that allowed multiple users to work on a system at any one time. It was called Multiplexed Information and Computing System (MULTICS). In the late 1960s, closer to 1970, a couple programmers at Bell Laboratories wrote an assembler to interface with a DEC PDP-7. Unlike MULTICS, this version allowed only one user to access it at a time. One of the programmers kiddingly called it Uniplexed Information and Computing System (UNICS) pronounced Unix. In the …show more content…

In Unix® there are three sets of permissions that can be modified at the folder and file level; user, group, and the world. In this illustration, user and group permissions will be discussed. To begin, a command at the console must be executed to create the user group. The syntax is: groupadd [g- gid [-o]] [-r] [-f] groupname. Simply typing in: groupadd group_name will suffice. Groupname is where you put in the specific name of the group. If you don’t specify additional parameters, the system will use the defaults. Following the creation of the group, the users must be added into it. Execute this command to add the existing users to the new group, Usermod –G <newgroup> <user>. Since there are 4990 user, a script would come in handy adding the users to the group. The VI editor is a built in tool that allows the building of scripts. Now the real work begins, defining the permissions for the file. From the console, navigate to the directory that contains the file that is to be shared. Type in this command to view the current permissions on the file, ls –l (those are lowercase L’s). This command will allow the changing of permissions either at a user, group or global level. Chmod {a,u,g,o} {+,-} {r,w,x} files a = all user u = the owner g = group o = others (neither u or g) | Plus (+) =give permissionMinus(-) = remove permission | r = Read-onlyw = Read/Writex = Execute | Files = single or multiple files |

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