User Permission Overwrite Group Permissin on Linux

Posted by Planet Malaysia on August 16, 2008

This is a tricky question when my customer ask me why he can’t change certain on his home folder.

Said for an example:
I have a username: john with primary group finance running on one of the Linux server.

$id john
uid=1008(john) gid=1002(finance) groups=1002(finance)

$pwd
/home/john

$ls -l aug2008.txt
-r-rw-r– 1 john finance 1168 2008-08-16 11.30 aug2008.txt

The problem is here:
When a user called john login to Linux box and he tried to edit file aug2008.txt using vi or any other editor, he will getting a READ ONLY error.

Why?
In Linux, basically the USER permission will overwrite GROUP permission even through you’re belong to the particular group which is yourself “john” cannot modify file “aug2008.txt” because of READ only permission evn through “john” primary group is “finance”.

Hope this can help.

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