I did some reading on this but still not clear.

How do I give the user sam both read and write privileges to folder /var/www/html/sams_website?

Hi

Do the following

If user sam is the owner of the directory

# chmod 755 /var/www/html/sams_website

If user sam is just a user

# chmod 775 /var/www/html/sams_website

My problem is sam is not the owner of the directory.

1. Do I need to make sam the directory owner for me to give that account read and write access

2. If I do, how do I make sam the owner of the directory?

This **might** work---some clarification:

The permissions are in the order: owner, group, others Thus, the above command gives full privileges to the owner and the group. This will work only if Sam is a member of the file's assigned group.

To give access to any user: chmod 777

To give access to ONLY Sam, where he is not the owner of the file, then Sam would have to be the only member of the file's group

If you're wondering what all the numbers mean:
for each digit: 4=read, 2=write, 1=execute
7= full privilege
6= read/write only
5= read/execute only
etc.

if Sam is to have complete control over the directory, make him the owner:

that way you can set permissions 755 - rwx for owner, rx for group (need these to view a dir), rx for everyone else (probably needed as it's for a website).

777 isn't recomended before you do that for ease