Directory permssions

laki47 · 08-04-2009, 02:13 AM

Hi!

I have a question regarding directory permissions. In home temp directory I put txt.txt file.

root@machine1:/home/jsmith # ls -ld temp
drw-r--r-- 2 jsmith users 96 Aug 4 09:16 temp

Notice that I DO NOT have execute permissions on temp. But I have read permissions.

Question:
Why can't I do ls -l temp with jsmith? I have read permission but seems that it doesn't work without execute permission.

It will be:

root@machine1:/home/jsmith # ls -l temp
temp/txt.txt not found
total 0

Thanks

neonsignal · 08-04-2009, 03:02 AM

This is a convention on Unix and Unix-like systems. The 'r' permission bit on a directory allows for files within the directory to be accessed by name. But the directory can only be 'searched' (eg by ls) if the 'x' permission is enabled.

There is a short summary in the wikipedia article on file permissions.