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Set permissions to alu1 home directory to passing (but not browsing) for group members and others.

What permissions are passing and not browsing?

I know I have to do something with chmod but I don't know the exact numbers I should put in.

Zanna
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Makaveli
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    Who/what told you to 'Set permissions to alu1 home directory to passing (but not browsing) to group members and others.' ? Was it translated automatically or written by a human? – sudodus May 02 '18 at 09:17
  • I need to add this permissions, this was writted by a human. And i don't know what to do with that – Makaveli May 02 '18 at 09:21
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    Possible duplicate of How do file permissions work? – David Foerster May 02 '18 at 12:26
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    [Not given as an answer; question is currently on hold.] I believe the instruction intends you to set "execute but not read" permissions, presumably u=rwx,go=x or 711. These let people traverse ("pass") the directory, but not list ("browse") the files it contains. Although it's an uncommon arrangement, I still use those permissions occasionally at work and we document them with similar wording. – Paul Whittaker May 02 '18 at 17:11
  • +1 for @PaulWhittaker's explanation and suggested solution :-) Let us reopen this question. – sudodus May 03 '18 at 05:36
  • @PaulWhittaker: Question re-opened. Please post that as an answer and then ping all of us who had no clue what OP was talking about and we'll come back and upvote your answer. – Fabby May 08 '18 at 08:17
  • @Fabby Thanks - ping! I've left my original comment alone, but please feel free to delete it if that would be the right thing to do. I could only '@' one user, so I'l leave you to spread the upvote word around. :-) – Paul Whittaker May 22 '18 at 22:22

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I believe they mean that you should set "execute but not read" permissions. This lets people traverse ("pass") the directory, but not list ("browse") the files it contains. Although it's an uncommon arrangement I still use those permissions occasionally at work, which is where I recognised the wording from.

In your case, it means that files and directories inside /home/alu1 can only be reached by other users if they already know the right path, and they can't use ls to find out any names they don't already know.

For example, if you knew that every user had a standard /home/<user>/Public/ directory with 777 permissions, then you'd be able to cd into that and use it as normal, but you wouldn't be able to see what else people kept at the top level in their home directory. (You might be able to have a guess at some things, of course, but that's a different story.)

If the alu1 home directory is /home/alu1, and assuming that you want to keep full permissions for the owner, then you can set the requested permissions as follows:

chmod 711 /home/alu1

Alternatively, if you prefer to use the symbolic permissions syntax, you should get the same results by using

chmod u=rwx,go=x /home/alu1
Paul Whittaker
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