Is there away to make a ":guest" account so they can only write to a guest directory but they dont really have access to certain programs?? Like i wanna make an account so when people come over and they wanna go on my computer they can like check out the net and download a few files and only certain programs?? Or is this to far fetched??

Thanx

Matt3333

I would recommend that you read up on permissions. I would start with the Book at http://www.slackware.com/book/index....rce=x2163.html . Then read man chmod. If you still don't undertand try googling.

To allow people I know to use my personal PC about all I would do is change the permissions on my home directory to read, execute for user only, perhaps /var and /sbin to read, execute for root only.
Getting much nore complicated would mean configuring your whole system with a certain plan in mind. What programs should be available to who, setting groups and permissions accordingly, and knowing the consequences of your configuration.

couldn't you add another group separate from users and when you make your guest account add them to that group instead? then turn off "other" access through chmod on the certain directories you don't want them to have. Since your normal users & groups should own the directories and files of their own data just turning off the "other" permission will lock out people who aren't a member of your group. If you're just worried about them getting access to your own files, well, your permissions should be set so that only the file owner has access to them.

The whole concept of group ownership and adding or subtracting people to different groups is so that you can have some people able to access certain things but not others. So yes, read up on permissions, chown, chmod, chgrp, etc. For example, if you only want you and say your brother to access music files or whatever, then create a directory called musicFiles, make a group called musicUsers, chgrp/chown the musicFiles directory and files in it to the new group, then add yourselves to that group. Finally turn off all other access to the files with chmod and make sure only the owner and group bits are set to whatever type of access you need. In this way, say if you chowned the files to you, you could give yourself read and write access to the directory. If you didn't want your brother to touch them, only use them, only give the group read permission, then he can't add or delete things to the directory. Giving other people (say your sister or parents maybe) access to the files is as simple as adding them to the group musicUsers or whatever you call it.

does that make sense?

some commands you might want to check are: chmod, chown, chgrp, groupadd, usermod, just to name a few.