If you're new to the UNIX operating system, especially if you're familiar with Windows, you'll find that the file access control mechanisms might not be exactly what you expect. File permissions and ...

November 28, 2012 Add as a preferred source on Google Add as a preferred source on Google You are not alone. In fact, I was pretty confused by file permissions for a long time, but it’s actually very ...

Unix permissions control who can read, write or execute a file. You can limit it to the owner of the file, the group that owns it or the entire world. For security reasons, files and directories ...

One of the files that the average Unix sysadmin rarely looks at, almost never changes and yet depends on every time he or she reboots a system is the /etc/inittab file. This modest little file ...

One of the questions that Unix users are sometimes reluctant to ask is how all the directory names — like /etc, /var and /usr/local — came about in the first place. Why did we adopt the particular ...

GUIs are great—we wouldn’t want to live without them. But if you’re a Mac or Linux user and you want to get the most out of your operating system (and your keystrokes), you owe it to yourself to get ...

Many times there will be odd names listed in the permissions field for files on their systems, and people have wondered about them and what they mean. Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, ...

We have looked at the fuser command before to display information about what users or processes are keeping file systems busy. This command can save you a lot of time tracking when you need to quickly ...