user home dir/permissions
 

i am creating a user that friends can use to winscp into my box and get movies.
i have set that users home dir to a folder called movies under my home dir.
but i need to make it so that the user cant go to any dir's othen then the one they are set to as thier home.

also, how do i set it so that the user can read that one folder in my home dir. as of right now i get a "permission denied" when i try to access that folder from that user.

Did you try using SymLinks?
for example the directory /root/movies

ln -s /root/movies /home/user/movies

remember to give the right permissions to the /root/movies directory.

im lost.... i havent heard of Symlinks before.. although i am kinda a linux newb...so you'll have to bare with me.
to me it sounds like you are trying to show me how to shortcut a dir.

Symlinks are simbolic links.
this binary do a link of your files or directories to another place in your system. this is usefull to evite replicate files and to save disk space. and it synchronizes the two directories so it have a lot of functions.
the -s option, make the links "not hard" so if the user deletes a file in the linked directory, it dont is deleted from the original directory. for more info of the ln command y recomend you to read the man pages.

saludos

thats not exactly what im looking for... what im doing is this

my account is xilace, the account i will have friends using is soaper.
i have set soapers home directory as /home/xilace/movies. i need to make it so that soaper only has permission to read that directory to get files out of it. soaper should ONLY have access to that ONE directory under xilace's home directory.

that is what im trying to accomplish.
thanks for any help.

if you wanna do that you have to chroot one mini system in each home directory. i never do that but for this to work, you must have a complete working filesystem in each
home directory (/home/foo/dev /home/foo/bin /home/foo/usr/bin /home/foo/etc
...).

This is not usually what you want for normal users, i recommend you to just start one ftp server like pureftpd, and enable the chroot option.