From the course: Red Hat Certified System Administrator (EX200) Cert Prep: 2 File Access, Storage, and Security

File and directory modes

From the course: Red Hat Certified System Administrator (EX200) Cert Prep: 2 File Access, Storage, and Security

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File and directory modes

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- Standard Linux permissions support three different modes; read, write, and execute. These three modes provide different functionality for files and directories. For files, read access means a user can open and read the contents of a file. When a user has write access to a file, they can write or modify the contents. When a user has execute permissions on a file, it means that the file can be run as an application. Commands like LS in applications like Firefox would have their execute bits set. What happens when a command is executed is it's loaded into memory and run until told to stop. These same three modes act differently on a directory. If a user has read access to a directory, it means they can list the contents of the directory which includes the metadata about the files and directories in it. If a user doesn't have read access and they type in LS inside the directory, they'll see a lot of question marks where the metadata should be. If a user has right access to a directory, it allows them to write to the directory. Writing to the directory means creating new files in it. Execute permissions on a directory are a bit odd. You're not going to run a directory like you would a command. Execute permissions means that you can enter or traverse the directory.

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