Hi,

I created a user group called ftp-users. Now I'd like to give this group read and write permissions to /var/www/html directory.

I'd appreciate your help with this.

chgrp ftp-users /var/www/html
chmod 760 /var/www/html

Just to give you a break down on chmod

There are three numbers (in this case 7, 6, and 0).

The first number designates the permissions for the owner of the file/directory.

Second is the owning group.

Third is everyone else.

Each number is really three bits, rwx. Just read permissions is the bits 100 (4), just write is 010 (2), just execute 001 (1). If you want to give execute and read you add execute and read together and you get 5. If you want to give both read and write it would be 6, and so on.

So 760 as I have in my example is read, write and execute for the owner, read and write for the owning group (which was changed to ftp-users with the chgrp command), and all other users have no access to this directory.

I hope this wasn't too confusing.

jtshaw,

Wow... I can't thank you enough. You gave me a lot more than I expected and your explanation is perfect. Thanks again.

If I can squeeze one more question: if I change the owner of the group, that wouldn't affect root right? root will always have full access to that folder. Is this a correct assumption?

Yes, root always has permissions to everything. Root can also always run chmod and chown/chgrp on a file regardless of its current permissions.

A user can only change the permissions of a file if it owns the file.

Hi,

After executing those two commands, I can no longer ftp into the site.

I have a user called myftpaccount which is a member of ftp-users group and in the /etc/passwd file I had changed the home directory for this user to /var/www/html.

When I tried to ftp into my site from a windows machine's command line, I got the following errors:
500 OOPS: Cannot change directory:/var/www/html
500 OOPS: Chield died

I tried ftping into the site on the linux machine and got the following error message:
500 OOPS: Cannot change directory:/var/www/html
Login failed

What have I done wrong?

Sorry, that is my bad. You need execute permissions.. try chmod 775 just to be sure.

jtshaw, thanks again. That fixed the problem. Now I can upload/delete files and create subdirectories. Thank you.