No, you can't modify a file unless you have write permission to that file. But if you have write permission to the directory, then you can "delete" the file. In this sense, a "file" is just a directory entry, so what you are doing is modifying the directory itself, the file is not touched at all so the file permissions are irrelevant.

Of course, a file can have multiple hard links, so you are not necessarily "deleting" the file, you are just removing the link in that directory. The file is only deleted when there are no more links to it (and no program has the file open).

You might want to have a look at The Linux Documentation Project, it has lots of HOWTOs, guides and so on. The System Administrator's Guide will teach you the basic of how the system works.

Aw, why don't I get homework concerning Linux?

All answers can be gathered using google here. And the TLDP.

Alright, well after a bit of tinkering around in Fedora along with the advice given here I think I've got a bit of an idea. Could anyone suggest a good distro that I could use at home? I've heard good things about RedHat and Mandrake but I don't know enough about Linux to choose.

It really is up to you, but fyi, Fedora (distro) is free from Redhat (company)

Why then does Novell/SuSE make links like /boot/grub and when you click on it, you get /boot/grub/grub and so on and so forth ... I never understood that. Do you know why?

I don't quite follow what you are using to do that but it's certainly not making hard links to directories. Presumably they are symlinks.

Yeah symlinks, sorry that was a little unclear. I used Konqueror to click on them. Still, what is the use of them, when all the iterations of /boot/grub -- /boot/grub/grub -- /boot/grub/grub/grub ... ad infinitum just point at /boot/grub ?

Well, there's not much point doing that, I'm not sure what Konqueror is doing there but if you don't specify a name for the link, it defaults to the target name, so I assume that's what is happening.

It's not me, it's the standard setup of SuSE at least since 6.3. I just can't see the reason for it and I thought you might know what can be accomplished that way, they must do it for a reason...

If you want to learn linux in a simple, sensible way, try arch

http://www.archlinux.org/

(i'm gonna sound like that dude that promotes Debian every thread :P)

Dunno, sounds pretty pointless to me... ?

Are you saying there is a file called "grub" in the /boot/grub directory, which is a link to /boot/grub ?

Show us - cd into that directory and post the output of ls -l (show us the link).

In general, you will find simlinks just pointing from odd-seeming places for backwards compatibility. This is why you will still find the old XFree86 directories there - many full of links to the xorg directories - even when xfree is no longer used.

You may also find a link /boot/grub/grub.conf pointing to /boot/grub/menue.lst, since these two files do the same thing and, while the distro maintainers may prefer one name, an app may reference the other.

Changing the name or location of a file can be a good idea, but doing so may break other programs. Hence the link from the old place to the new one. (Rather than try to convince several thousand programmers to do the same change see?)

I hope this is coherent.

After re-reading the post, I'm now a bit unclear on what exactly he has myself. At first it sounded like recursive links (/boot/grub/grub/grub etc), but this is impossible.

Will do that ASAP, now sitting in front of a Winbox .

I suppose there may be another one, but not all files consist of bytes. An awful lot are bit-based.