I want to give user testuser read access to /Media/Test without making them the owner of the directory, nor giving access to everyone. How would I go about this?
I want to do this because I'm worried about the consequences of not being the owner of the directory (with all of my stuff inside) with my "personal" user. Is this justified?
Regarding your request, not making testuser the owner, nor making it world readable, the easiest solution would be to add a seperate group (testgroup), add the testuser there, chown the directory to the group and finally chmod the directory to 750.
groupadd testgroup
useradd -G testgroup testuser
chown :testgroup /Media/Test
chmod 750 /Media/Test
If you already have files in there, you have to use -R switch for chown and chmod to change the files in it as well. In addition, if you add files or directories later within the directory, you have to make sure the group settings are correct (morph:testgroup), as long as testuser should have access to this new files. Of course you can add your own user to that group too.
useradd -G testgroup morph
Furthermore I want to add, that as long as you are root on your system -- or as long as you can use sudo --, you don't have to be worried, because you can change back every standard file permissions, as long as they are not further protected by a specific MAC (media access control) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_access_control) sytem like selinux. But I assume they aren't in your case.
