Hello again,

I just created a user account for my mom and would like to set it so that she can't access any of my personal files. I used the commands
chmod o-r <directory name>
chmod o-r -R <directory name>
chmod o-rwx <directory name>
chmod o-rwx -R <directory name>
None of those commands worked. Instead, I received the message "Operation not permitted". And yes, I was logged in as root. Can someone please tell me what I'm doing wrong and how I can change the permissions. Thanks a lot.

-Seppe

Hi

Assuming you simply want these files inaccessible by anyone besides yourself and root, here's the commands I'd use:
chown -R yourusername.root /path/to/directory
chmod -R 700 /path/to/directory

This should give you full control over your files and directories while still maintaining inaccessibility by anyone else other than root.

Cool

Thanks for the advice, however, it did not work.

I used the chmod command and was able to change the permissions on one of my files in my /home/username directory, so I know I'm typing it in correctly and my computer's not broken.

I want to change the permission of a directory that is located on a different partition on my hard drive than linux is (a fat32 partition to be exact) under /mnt

Does that make a difference? Perhaps that would explain why I can change permissions in my /home/username directory, but not for the one I want. Thanks for any help anyone can give me.

-Seppe

FAT32 doesn't support Linux-style permissions.

You can either set permissions for the entire partition during mounting, or you can move the files to a Linux filesystem.

Cool

To set permissions on Windows drives, use gid=*,uid=*, and umask=* in the /etc/fstab file.
Search here for more info.