The first thing to learn is that everything on the disk is a file. There are just different types of files on the filesystem. There are directories, sockets, links, pipes, devices, and normal files. We won't be talking about sockets, pipes and devices here because those are too advanced and rarely used by anyone other than the most advanced programmers or system administrators.

Terminology:

Hidden Files:
Nothing on the Linux filesystem is trully hidden. However, files that start with a '.' will not show up on a normal directory listing. To see the files in your current directory, you just type 'ls'. This will show all non-hidden files. If you want to see the hidden files, then you need to type 'ls -a' (a=all files) to see those 'hidden' files.

Directories:
You already know how these work. They are called 'folders' in Windows. A directory contains other files. You can have a directory in a directory in a directory, etc. Directories can also contain links, and normal files. Here are some basic directory commands:
mkdir [directory] Makes a directory with the specified name.
rmdir [directory] Removes a directory with the specified name. Only works on empty directories.
cd [directory] Allows you to change into that directory, so that you can operate on the files in that directory. There are two 'special' directories in every directory, and they are '.' and '..'. '.' represents the current directory, so 'cd .' takes you nowhere. '..' represents the parent directory of the current directory. This means that if you are in '/home/personal/kelly/src/project1/' and you want to go to '/home/personal/kelly/src/', you can do 'cd ..'. If you type 'cd' with no arguments, you will be taken back to your home directory.

Normal Files:
Normal files (called 'files' hereafter) make up a vast majority of the contents of a filesystem. A file can consist of a library, a text file, a shell script, source code, or just about anything else imaginable. There are five main things to remember about each file: owner, group owner, permissions, path, and filename.

Each file is owned by two different entities. The first is tied to a user account. In your case, each file will be owned by 'kelly' (your unix account). The second entity that owns files is the group. In your case, most of the files will be owned by 'users' which is a collection of all of the users on the system.

What keeps other 'users' from modifying your files? The permissions. There are three sets of permissions for each file. One is for the user (e.g.: 'kelly'), one is for the group (e.g.: 'users'), and the last is for everyone else (the world, or others.) Each set of permissions contains three basics sets of information: read, write, and execute. This means that you can set 'kelly' to read and write a file, while 'users' only gets to read the file, and everyone else gets no permissions at all. Here's a sample directory listing:

-rwxr-x---  1 zeavon spear 1531 Jan 11 14:40 autospear
drwxr-xr-x  2 zeavon spear 4096 Jan 11 14:51 bin/
drwxr-xr-x  4 zeavon spear 4096 Dec 29 23:39 log/
-rwxr-x---  1 zeavon spear  406 Feb 24  2003 postboot
-rw-r--r--  1 zeavon spear   47 Jan 11 14:55 syslog
The first 10 columns tells us what kind of file the entry is and what its permissions are. The first column tells what kind of file it is. If there is a 'd' there, it's a directory. If there is a '-' there, then it is a file. There are other characters that can be in there as well, but we'll not cover them here.

The next three columns tell us the permissions that the owner 'zeavon' has. If there is a 'r', then zeavon can read the file. If there is a 'w', then zeavon can write to the file. If there is an 'x', then zeavon can execute the file. In this case, 'zeavon' can read, write, and execute everything in there, except for 'syslog'. This is because 'autospear', and 'postboot' are scripts to be run, and 'syslog' is just a normal text file.

The next three columns tell us the permissions that the group 'spear' has. The same rules apply here. According to the output, the 'spear' group can read everything, can write to nothing, and can only excecute 'autospear', 'postboot', and the directories 'bin' and 'log' (see the note below on how the execute bit affects directories.)

The next three columns tell us how everyone else can access the files. The same rules apply here. The world has read and execute permissions on 'bin' and 'log', and read permissions on 'syslog', but nothing else. That means that the 'kelly' account could see the contents of 'syslog', but not modify them. The 'kelly' account also could not even view the contents of 'autospear' or 'postboot', and 'kelly' could certainly not execute those scripts.

NOTE: If a directory has an execute bit, that means that the person with the permissions could 'cd' to that directory, but it does not allow them to change anything in that directory unless they also had the write permission as well. If the execute bit is missing for a user/group/world, then they are totally locked out of it. If you end up with a directory that you cannot 'cd' to, but you think you should be able to, check the execute bit.

NOTE 2:: Windows determines if a file is executable by its extension (the part after the '.' in the filename.) This is not true of Linux. Just because something is named 'runme.exe' does not mean that Linux will run it. You can take a file named 'willnotrun.txt' and do a 'chmod u+x willnotrun.txt' on the file, and suddenly it become executable. However, this does not mean that it will run properly unless it is a binary file or a properly built shell script. When you create a new binary (e.g.: fpc program.pas) the resulting binary file (program) will not be executable (unless the compiler does it for you) until you perform a 'chmod u+x program' on the file.

Changing Ownership:
To change the ownership of a file, you use the 'chown' command. It's pretty simple. You specify the new user, the new group, and the file to change. Example:
chown kelly:users source.pas
That would change the user owner for 'source.pas' to 'kelly' and the group owner to 'users'.

Changing Permissions:
To change the permission of a file, you use the 'chmod' (change mode) command. This one is a little more complex than the 'chown' command. You need to specify which type of mode you are changing (user, group, or other), and what bits you are changing, and then what filename you are applying these changes to. Here are some exmaples:

NOTE: There is a more effiecient way to change all permsissions at once, but this requires more in-depth knowledge, and we're just trying to cover the basics.

Links:
Links are 'pointers' from one location to another. If you have a really long directory name (/opt/www/jtevans/htdocs/rpg/dnd/tools/) and you go to that directory quite often, it is possible to create a link from your home directory to point to the long directory name. This allows you to type something simple (cd tools) instead of something long (cd /opt/www/jtevans/htdocs/rpg/dnd/tools/). There are also cases where you have software that you upgrade quite often, so you may end up with a bunch of files like acrobat4, acrobat5, acrobat6, acrobat7, acrobat7.01, etc. Instead of trying to remember which was the latest version, and typing it each time, you can create a link when you an upgrade to point to the latest version. This allows you to type 'acrobat' and get to the latest version. To create a link, you simple do:
ln -s [source] [target]
In other words, I have done this in my home directory:
ln -s /opt/www/jtevans/htdocs/rpg/dnd/tools tools
and this allows me to type 'cd tools' from my home directory to get to the really long path name.

Last Modified: 2006-04-19

Copyright © 2006-2019 - John Evans