Baslinux mailing list

[Ian Scott <mriscott AT yahoo.co.uk>]

> I am tired of running into things user cannot do, such as write
> files to disk. 

A normal user can write files to disk, but only where the permissions
allow him to.

The unix filesystem is set up with user control.  If you set up users
they only have access to certain bits of the filesystem, so they can't
mess stuff up (e.g. by doing rm -rf /bin!!). You can give users
permission write to different areas by the chmod command:

chmod 777  file

Gives full access (read,write and execute) to that file.  If you do
that as root, then any user can edit that file.


Alternatively, a user can usually edit files in his home directory.

This is part of the security of how a multiuser unix system works -
you don't want a normal user to be able to trample all over the
system.


Ian