file permissions
 

I have Mandrake 9.0 loaded on my - hope to be router - and would like to make some changes to some of the files.
I logged in (setup) as 'root' and thought I would have admin privilages but apparently not.

When I attempt to save a file after making a change I get a message something like 'Cannot create backup file' and then it says it cannot save the file because I don't have permission.

What/where does one change to grant themselves 'admin' or full permissions?

Thanks

You can change owner ship and permissions with a combination of

chown and chmod

chown username path_to_file

changes ownership

chmod 777 path_to_file

gives full permissions to all 3 user levels

you shouldn't need to chmod 777 the files, in fact you shouldn't, for security reasons. If you've logged in as root, then you should have full rwx permission for everything.
If you want to grant another user root permission, look into sudo.
I'm not sure why you can't save files, I've never seen that error before. Does it happen all of the time, or just with one specific file? Try creating a dummy file under /root called dummy, with some text using some text editor, and see if that'll work. Then get back to us

Thanks.........your info helped a lot.