Linux's permissions system is very different from that of Windows. For a crash course, each permission has a few facets assigned to it. Namely, there are three octal bits (u
, g
, and o
) that control who can access the file and to what degree. There is also a concept called a file "owner", which is a pair of a user and a group that has control over a single file (and are controlled by the u
and g
bits). For a more detailed look into how Linux permissions work, check out this excellent writeup over on the Arch Wiki.
In your case, the files are owned by the nobody
user and the nogroup
group, and the permissions are set such that the nobody
user can read, write, and execute files while the nogroup
group can only read and execute. Similarly, everyone else can only read or execute the files.
That said, there are about three solutions to this problem. You can become the nobody
user, you can become root
, or you can change ownership of these files. The first one is really not recommended, as the nobody
user is a special account that shouldn't really get used.
If you just want to delete the files and be done with it, you're going to need to use the terminal. Just run the below command to delete any specific file:
sudo rm /path/to/file/you/want/gone
If you want to delete a folder, you need to use a different command:
sudo rm -rf /path/to/the/folder/you/want/gone
Before pressing ENTER, make sure your command is free of typos or other errors. These commands are very dangerous, and can have unintended side effects if a command is typed improperly.
Alternatively (and probably the better way), you can take ownership of the files, giving you full control over them. Linux has something called the chown
command for exactly this purpose. I'd assume you want to change the ownership of everything, so use this command:
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /path/to/your/folder
If you only want to change the ownership of a single file, it's this command:
sudo chown $USER:$USER /path/to/your/file
For more information into how chown
works, run the man chown
command in your terminal to pull up its manual. Once again, be very careful with typographical errors -- they can and will bite you in unexpected ways.
ls -l
? How did you copy the files? They probably have the wrong owner. – Sethos II May 8 '17 at 5:00ls -l
in terminal and you'll get an output, update your question with that output – Sumeet Deshmukh May 8 '17 at 5:10ls -l
– Sumeet Deshmukh May 8 '17 at 7:55