Setgid Directories
In a recent post Bill said:
> > And all of this will of course come as a complete suprise to debian
> > installers/users who have not been party to this discussion. They'll
> > need to be clued in about it, or it'll cause lots of confusion for them.
[...]
I was talking about someone who installs debian who does something like
"ls -ld /*", and sees lots of "drwxr-sr-x" permissions.
That person then wonders, "Why on earth are the sgid bits set on all those
directories???
So I imagined me being the clueless user of such a system, What'd I do if I
found something like that? I'd start in the manpages about 'ls', there could
be a pointer there into a Debian FAQ, or Directories FAQ or some such thing
which would explain the whys and hows.
So now that I have a clue as formerly clueless user, I'd think: "Hey, it's a
feature, not a bug. Great!", assuming the FAQ answered all the fearful
questions I might ask. "I want to use my Linux box as a dial in unix system,
is this scheme just as secure as the one used by Slackware?" or "Will there be
any difficulty when I tar something on my machine and untar it on a machine
not using this scheme?" etc.
By now I should be thankful for this feature, if merely because I learned a
great deal about file permissions.
Marko
---
Marko Sch"utz / Koselstr. 7 / D 60318 Frankfurt / Germany
marko@hisplace.rhein-main.de / Tel: +49 69 5971621
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