symlink permisions?

shanenin · 03-02-2005, 05:55 PM

I noticed a lot of my symlinks have permsissions of 777. I noticed when I created my last symlink it gave me permissions of 755. Do I need full permissions on the link?

foo_bar_foo · 03-02-2005, 11:16 PM

i'm afraid you must be confused in some way

changing permission on a symbolic link (ln -s) alters the permissions of the target only
the link always reads
lrwxrwxrwx
the link is just a pointer
hard links (ln) on the other hand (an inode having multiple names) are a different story
hard links i think are to be avoided as they can leave permissions to a file via the link
different than what the file is set. and can exist outside the target directory leaving the duplicated inode hard to see and possibly under the controll of others.

shanenin · 03-03-2005, 08:52 AM

I made a link the following way

Code:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/bash /bin/bash

now when I check the permissions of my newly made link

Code:

ls -l /bin/bash

I get this output

Code:

lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  19 Mar  2 18:38 /bin/bash -> /usr/local/bin/bash

should the link the giving me permisissions of lrwxrwxrwx, because it is not. Should I be chmoding it to lrwxrwxrwx. Isn't the default action ln -s to make a link with full permissions, why is my system not doing that?

mikshaw · 03-03-2005, 09:06 AM

It could be that your ls command is an alias to 'ls -H', which follows the link rather than giving you info on the link itself.

If this is the case you could try '\ls -l /bin/bash'

Another possibility is that you already have a /bin/bash, but i assume you would have gotten a message while attempting to create the link.

shanenin · 03-03-2005, 09:51 AM

I just did a test. I made a file, then gave it permissions of 777. Then I made a link to that file, the permissions of the link were still 755.