Lock folders by password, is there easy way? any program? [duplicate]

Question

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Is there a way to password protect individual folders?

Something without creating new filesystem/emcrypted-partition, do you know a good program?

Thanks!

Answer 1

There is a couple of ways to do this.

1) using crypt command. This command can encrypt and decrypt a file for you. (you might need to install it by 'sudo apt-get install mcrypt').

2) change read permission for the directory.

Answer 2

You can create/mount an encrypted directory with encfs like this:

mkdir -p ./content
encfs -i 5 $PWD/raw $PWD/content

The first time you do this it will ask some questions, you can accept the defaults, and it will ask for a password which you will have to enter later every time to unlock.

The encrypted content will be created under $PWD/raw, which will be mounted on $PWD/content. You can create files in $PWD/content or just copy there, and you will see that $PWD/raw gets populated with unreadable data. $PWD/content is visible only by your user, not even root can see it. When you are done editing, unmount with fusermount -u ./content, this will wipe out the content of $PWD/content. To mount again, repeat the encfs command above.

The path parameters for encfs must be absolute paths, that's why I used $PWD above, to use directories in the current working directory.

The -i 5 means unmount automatically after idle for 5 minutes.