FreeBSD6 Unleashed

File Ownership

This brings us to our file ownership model. All UNIXes have the same kind of ownership structure: Every file and directory is owned by both a user and a group. As you will see in a moment, this does not necessarily mean that either the user or the members of the group have any particular permissions to access the file or directory. Ownership does come into play, though, in conjunction with the permissions settings that indicate what the owner user and other users can do with the file.

Let’s take a look at the permissions and ownership details of a set of files (see Listing 13.1). Here we use the -l option to ls to give a detailed listing, and we use the -a option to show all files, including “hidden” ones (those whose names begin ...