How to show current permissions of a folder

Question

I want to find out who has what permissions on a certain folder. How would I go about viewing this?

The folder in question is /srv/www

Answer 1

On the command line you'd issue a ls -la /srv/www. The part that is interesting for you is the second line.

Explanation of all columns:

total [NUMBER]
[PERMISSIONS] [LINKS] [OWNER] [GROUP]  [FILE SIZE] [MODIFICATION DATE] [ITEM]

Sample output:

total 52
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root  4096 2011-04-13 13:03 .
drwxr-xr-x 23 root root  4096 2011-04-17 19:31 ..

Now the really interesting part for your is the line of the . element as that represents the current directory.

The permissions of the current directory in my sample drwxr-xr-x would mean the following:

• d for directory
• rwx means read, write and execute permissions for the owner
• r-x means read and execute permissions for the group
• r-x means read and execute permissions for all others

To get the permissions in the GUI you would

1. Right-click the directory you want to know the permissions of and select Properties.

2. Click on the Permissions tab to get this

   

Answer 2

You can also use:

ls -ld /path/to/directory

if you are only interested in the permissions of the directory and not its contents

Answer 3

If you are running X then right click, properties, permissions tab... otherwise try 'ls -l' in the terminal