One of the most common tasks in Linux administration is changing directory permissions. You may need to secure sensitive data or set up a shared workspace for your team. Understanding Linux permissions is crucial to managing files and directories.
Here’s a walkthrough showing how to share a folder with your team by assigning it to the devteam group and applying the correct permissions. This example assumes the devteam group already exists.
(I’ll cover how to create a group and add members in an upcoming post.)
Index
- Check the current permissions
- Assign the directory to the team group
- Give the owner and group full access
- Confirm the setup
- Summary
1. Check the current permissions
Before changing anything, check the directory permissions:
ls -ld sharedfiles – Where the directory name is “sharedfiles“
You’ll see:
This tells you:
-
Owner: read, write, execute (rwx)
-
Group: read, execute (r-x)
-
Others: read, execute (r-x)
2. Assign the directory to the team group
chgrp devteam sharedfiles
3. Give the owner and group full access
chmod 770 sharedfiles
770 is a permission setting that gives full access to the owner and the group, and no access to anyone else.
7 (owner) → read, write, execute
7 (group) → read, write, execute
0 (others) → no permissions at all
4. Confirm the changes
ls -ld sharedfiles
Now:
-
You (the owner) can read/write/execute
-
Your team (devteam) can read/write/execute
-
No one else can access the folder
5. Summary
This is how shared project directories, departmental folders, and collaboration workspaces are secured in production environments. There are other ways to do this on a more granular level using ACL permissions, and I’ll leave that for another post.
Use Case: Imagine you’re supporting a development team that needs a shared directory where everyone can collaborate, but you don’t want other users on the system to access or modify the files.
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