What's Linux analog for "everyone" security principal on Windows

Question

Is there any Linux analog for "everyone" security principal on windows, or the mechanism for really the same effect ?

Answer 1

The link given by PerlDuck describes what file permissions are.

Here is a short summary. If you want to give everyone access to a file or directory, you can do this simply by:

chmod a+rwx <filename/directoryname>

E.g.: Make an empty file with

touch myTestFile.txt

Now look at the permission settings with

ls -l myTestFile.txt

or get even more information with

stat myTestFile.txt

Depending how the umask is set, you will get something like

-rw-r--r-- 1 aaa bbb 0 Jul 12 15:58 myTestFile.txt

Here aaa is your username, and bbb is the groupname.

Now you can allow others/all write(w), read(r) or execute(x) access with the following command:

chmod o+rwx myTestFile.txt

or

chmod a+rwx myTestFile.txt

The later changes permission to owner, group and others (=all), while the first only change permission to others.

If you are now typing

ls -l myTestFile.txt

you can see that the permissions have been set.

Using a gui based file browser

You can also use a file browser to change file permissions.
For instance on a gnome desktop open nautilus, right-click on a directory/file and change to the permissions tab. You will see a window like the one below. You can now change the permissions for others by clicking on the others-access list.