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I want to find out who has what permissions on a certain folder. How would I go about viewing this?

The folder in question is /srv/www

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You have explained excellently @Octavian Damiean.In the GUI based property/permission setting most boxes are grayed out. and you cannot change them, is it because they were created by ROOT and the user is NON ROOT?? –  RiG SEO Service Jul 22 at 9:59

2 Answers 2

up vote 13 down vote accepted

On the command line you'd issue a ls -la /srv/www. The part that is interesting for you is the second line.

Explanation of all columns:

total [NUMBER]

Sample output:

total 52
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root  4096 2011-04-13 13:03 .
drwxr-xr-x 23 root root  4096 2011-04-17 19:31 ..

Now the really interesting part for your is the line of the . element as that represents the current directory.

The permissions of the current directory in my sample drwxr-xr-x would mean the following:

  • d for directory
  • rwx means read, write and execute permissions for the owner
  • r-x means read and execute permissions for the group
  • r-x means read and execute permissions for all others

To get the permissions in the GUI you would

  1. Right-click the directory you want to know the permissions of and select Properties.

  2. Click on the Permissions tab to get this

    enter image description here

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That's great, thanks! –  Dean Perry May 17 '11 at 18:51

If you are running X then right click, properties, permissions tab... otherwise try 'ls -l' in the terminal

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