Managing File and Directory Permissions

Checking permissions

If we’re the system administrator, or if we can run the sudo command, we can change the permissions on files and directories anywhere on our system.

The file structure we made in the home directory is something other users on the machine could use, so let’s copy the structure into the /var directory so others can access it. We use the sudo command since we don’t have write access to the /var directory:

$ sudo cp -r ~/files /var/files

Next, we get a long listing of the /var/files directory, showing all hidden files. This lets us view the permissions of the /var/files directory itself:

su temp
sudo mkdir -p files/{movies,music,photos,docs/{diagrams,markdown},code/{go,js,elm}}
clear
sudo cp -r /files /var/files
ls -alh /var/files

Run the complete code on the terminal below for practice.