Protecting files and directories

Reading a long listing

In ``Listing more information about files'', you learned how to use the l command to create a long listing (remember to use the -L option to see the files rather than the links):

   $ ls -l -L /etc
   total 4566
   -rwx------   1 bin      bin        10510 Mar 16  1993 aiolkinit
   -rw-rw-r--   1 root     mem           48 Jun 17 08:34 arp_data
   -rwx------   2 bin      bin         2966 Mar 15  1993 asktime
   -rwx------   2 bin      bin         2966 Mar 15  1993 asktimerc
   drwxrwx--x   4 auth     auth          80 Mar 24  1993 auth
   -r-x------   1 bin      auth        1706 Mar 15  1993 authckrc
   -rwx--x--x   1 root     root      128266 Mar 12  1993 automount
   -rw-r--r--   1 root     root           0 Jun 17 08:34 advtab
   ...

In a long listing you see the permissions, the number of links, the owner, the group, the size in bytes, the modification date, and the name of the file. In this section, we will be looking at the permissions, the owner, and the group.