We have already discussed the directory structure in Slackware Linux. You
are able to find files and directories that you need. But there is more
to the filesystem than just the directory structure.
Linux is a multiuser operating system. Every aspect of the system is
multiuser, even the filesystem. The system stores information like who
owns a file and who can read it. There are other unique parts about the
filesystems, such as links and NFS mounts. This section explains these,
as well as the multiuser aspects of the filesystem.
The filesystem stores ownership information for each file and directory on
the system. This includes what owner and group own a particular file.
The easiest way to see this information is with the ls
command:
$ ls -l /usr/bin/wc
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root bin 7368 Jul 30 1999 /usr/bin/wc
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We are interested in the third and fourth columns. These contain the
username and group name that owns this file. We see that the user
“root” and the group “bin” own this file.
We can easily change the file owners with the
chown(1) (which means “change owner”)
and chgrp(1) (which means “change
group”) commands. To change the file owner to
“daemon”, we would use chown:
# chown daemon /usr/bin/wc
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To change the group owner to “root”, we would use
chgrp:
We can also use chown to specify the user and group
owners for a file:
# chown daemon.root /usr/bin/wc
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File ownership is a very important part of using a Linux system, even if
you are the only user. You sometimes need to fix ownerships on files and
device nodes.