Support, Questions and other Discussions

Wiki pages aren't effective place for discussion.
Use the mailing-lists or IRC instead. see http://www.debian.org/support

Your contributions and feedback are welcome.

Should we not use +-=rwx instead of octal representation? It will make it easier for beginners. Of course the translation between octal and symbols should be there, but I would prefere to use symbols, as it help people not acustom with octal numbers. @AndersJackson@

This wiki lost my message

Left a long message here. Pressed <save changes>. The Wiki said: "Sorry. We have not saved your changes because 'Deb**n' is not allowed in this wiki". It lost all my feedback. @markling@

This was caused by the usual typo of Debian being banned. I've removed the ban, it was clearly a bad idea.

A note on path handling

This note is not clear to me. It assumes reader knows what a path is. Do you mean path as in a path environment variable? Or do you mean more generally a folder name?

"To access any path in the filesystem, the user (which the particular process is running as) needs at least execute privilege for all its parent directories."

This does not make sense. On the one hand, how can it be that you need execute privilages to read something? In the opening paragraph of this wiki, the author says permissions make linux the most secure o/s. Yet here it says you have to give people execute permissions in order for them to read. That implies that it is an insecure o/s.

"if you try to access an example file ... even though it has a [read] mode... it does not necessarily mean you are free to read it."

It might make sense if you explained why.

"To read the file, you have to be able to 'execute' all of its parent directories,"

It still doesn't make any sense a second time.

"This rule applies anywhere in the filesystem."

I get the sense that this is very important. And that it might help if the explanation were broken down a little. I came here because I am having trouble simply copying files to a USB, because linux persmissions make it difficult. I had assumed that my USB would not allow execute permissions. That seems like a sensible security precaution for a USB. But what you say here suggests I may have to give everything on my USB execute permission. What then is the point of giving the user the option to specify it in the first place? @markling@