I'd think that some tool exists like this, but I've never heard of anything like it in my travels.

I have a user who habitually saves documents where he shouldn't. His mp3's will show up in a folder where his Word files are supposed to go... he'll have strange files in a folder which is only supposed to house a certain project, YouSendIt files show up in his iTunes folders, etc. I could probably train him more-effectively (and keep things from getting too bad before I could step in to fix things) if I could be alerted as soon as he starts saving stuff in the wrong place.

It dawned on me that I really need a tool which would crawl the filesystem a few times per day looking for files called, say, ".folderpolicy". Within that file, you might see something like:

# Only music files!
ALLOW .mp3 .aif .flac .aac
DENY ALL

- or... you could deny things like sub-folders and symbolic links...
DENY FOLDER SYMLINK


The folder policy would be in effect for all files and folders within and below the folder where .folderpolicy was found until a new .folderpolicy was encountered.

Any violations to the policy could either... email me, put a pop-up in front of the user, whatever.

Is there anything like that already out there?

I don't know if there's a native utility for this but you could set up a cron job that runs a script that does what you want.. Shouldn't be too difficult to implement.

Slightly confused, so I will assume you are asking about doing this on a Linux type system, so check out:
John

I'm not sure acl's will address the OP's concern. However, I did find this after a google search:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questi...t-by-file-type

Appears to address the problem, but I skimmed it briefly so not 100 certain.

I think setfacl(1) should work for the OP, for example
will prevent access to Dir "dirname", changing '---' to 'r-x' will give the dir just read access. This assumes the 'global' access (chmod) does not allow access by all users.

The OP will have experiment with settings. I would suggest one should prevent access by everyone and add access to people you want to have read/write access on a per user basis via setfacl(1).

John

I believe the OP is looking for a way to restrict placement of files in directories based on file type though - e.g. PDF/ houses only PDF files, Documents/ houses only *.doc* files, etc. Locking down access won't achieve that because the offending user would still need access to the directory to perform daily tasks

(Edited - misread permission set)

Based upon my initial confusion with the question, you could be right, in that case acl will not work.

Anyway at least the OP has two possible solutions.

John