Hi There - I am running 10.1 and wonder if anyone could help me find where I can get a discription of all the files and what they do that are listed in the left hand column in permissions. Some are pretty easy to decipher but I have not got a clue on the others. Also anyone explain what the 'wheel' is.

Many thanks for looking.

Your post is very vague. We need more info to be able to help you. What "permissions" are you looking at?

Thanks for your reply - the permissions I would like to find out about and what they do are the ones that are located in Mandrake control center, under the security section. Also, if you make a 'rule change', in the right hand box that comes up there is one item maked 'wheel'. Any idea what that means please.

Thanks

I haven't used Mandrake in a while now, but have a look at this. You're talking about the numerical values in that permissions column, yeah? Here's a little bit of info:

There are 3 numbers, from right to left, they are the permissions of the owner of the file, the file's group and everyone else. For each of those columns, you can set 3 permissions on the file: read, write and execute. Read has a value of 4, write 2 and execute 1. You just add them up. So for example, if a file has a 7 in the first column, that means its owner and read, write and execute the file (4 + 2 + 1 = 7). If you see 777, the owner, all users in the file's group and everyone else can read, write and execute the file. There's some more info about this here (although it's just a general Linux thing and not specifically for Mandrake).

Edit: I should also mention that you set permissions on a file with the chmod command. Open a terminal and type "man chmod" without the quotes for more info.

I'm not sure about "wheel", though.

Hope that helps a little bit though.

The wheel is a group traditionally used by the "big wheels" on the system... i.e. the administrative users.

Because it is tradition, this is why I don't use it on my systems. Not only is the group-name well known, but the users who created files that belong to that group are instantly fingered as possible targets for attack. "Inconvenient" though it might be, even sysadmin folks should have ordinary accounts.

Many Thanks for your replies, most helpful - I had a vague understanding about the numeric numbers and how to change them so thanks for explaining it in more detail.

What I was really after is where can I find out what the file names mean, that is the left hand column next to the red stop signs. e.g. /etc/gettydefs - /etc/inetd.conf etc etc

Ok on the 'wheel' explanation, thanks also for that.

Thanks again in anticipation.

Also try:

man ls

and look at the -l option, it explains the permissions a bit.

also

man chmod
man chown

Sorry High-gain, I didn't realise. I'm not too sure about all the files myself to be honest. Maybe try searching Google. I found this about /etc/inetd.conf.

Here is a page about /etc/fstab as well.

Many thanks again for your replies and help. It's been most useful and very intersting, especially the link to /etc/fstab.
Will do more with Google and see if I can get anymore info on the file names and their uses.

If anyone else knows where I can find more help on the above then please post.

Once again thanks for your help. Most appreciated. Good Luck.