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How to make a public folder within a private folder?

My Linux username is "virchanza" and my group is "virchanza". Here's how my home folder looks:

Code:

virchanza$ ls -alhd /home/virchanza

drwx------ 59 virchanza virchanza 20K 2010-09-21 20:55 virchanza

As you can see, I have full access to my home folder, but my "group" and "others" have no access whatsoever.

Inside my home folder, I want to create a publicly accessible folder called "public_stuff":

Code:

virchanza$ cd

virchanza$ mkdir public_stuff

virchanza$ chmod 777 public_stuff

virchanza$ ls -alhd public_stuff

drwxrwxrwx 2 virchanza virchanza 4.0K 2010-09-21 21:32 public_stuff

OK, you can see that this "public_stuff" folder has full access permissions for everyone. Now I'm gonna create a file inside this folder:

Code:

virchanza$ cd public_stuff

virchanza$ echo "One two three four five" > file.txt

virchanza$ chmod 777 file.txt

virchanza$ ls -alh

total 40K

drwxrwxrwx  2 virchanza virchanza 4.0K 2010-09-21 21:35 .

drwx------ 60 virchanza virchanza  20K 2010-09-21 21:32 ..

-rwxrwxrwx  1 virchanza virchanza  24 2010-09-21 21:35 file.txt

Now I'm going to navigate back to the "/home" folder and switch to a different user

Code:

virchanza$ cd /home

virchanza$ su guest_user

Password:

guest_user$ cat /home/virchanza/public_stuff/file.txt

cat: /home/virchanza/public_stuff/file.txt: Permission denied

guest_user$

I thought this would work... but it doesn't.

How do I make a publicly-accessible folder within my private home folder?

In order for someone to see a file a few permissions need to be in place:

First, they have to have access to the file itself which you've done.
Second, All the directories leading to that file must be executable by the person who wants to browse to this file.

I would recommend setting up a public location in a common directory rather than in your home directory for this purpose.

Regards,

Alunduil

Hey Alunduil thanks a lot for your reply.

I got everything working the way I wanted it.

The "public folder" which I want to keep inside my private home folder actually contains the files for my website (I have a web server demon running on my machine) . I want to keep my website files within my home folder.

I added "o+x" to my home folder permissions so now everything is working fine (people can navigate into my home folder but they are unable to view its contents because I didn't specify "o+r" for my home folder).

Thanks a lot for your help!

Virchanza

No problem. Just for further edification:

* If you would ever need to delete that user (which I doubt you would) you don't want to delete the user's information because now the website would be deleted as well.
* Setting up websites that are accessible in this manner is typically best solved by setting up the website in a www directory (usually in /var) and then symlinking that directory into the home directory.

I'm glad everything is working just wanted to provide a couple of alternatives.

Regards,

Alunduil