> I have a partition on my hard drive called /private. Now I want to makie > this so that only root and user Scott can see this directory. What would > be the best combination of chown and chgrp as well as chmod? Will I need > to umask also? Thanks for the help. Well, since root can see anything (unless you go the route of encrypted file-systems, in which case it becomes a different game), you're really just concerned about the user Scott accessing it. It would be the same as your home directory for ~Scott in that it should be set to the following privs: User: read, write, execute Group & other: none You'd then want to use "umask" (best done as a call in one of the profile or .login files for the "scott" account) so that files have the privs User: read, write, not execute Group & Other: none I don't remember off the top of my head which direction the bits go for the umask command, but I think that would be 077, which would strip off rights by default for Group and Others. If "scott" doesn't already own the /private directory, you can "su" to root, and change the ownership, so you'd do something like login: scott password: **** scott@mybox# su root@mybox$ chmod o-rwx /private root@mybox$ chmod ug+rwx /private root@mybox$ chown scott.scott /private root@mybox$ exit scott@mybox# echo umask 077 >> ~/.profile This assumes that you've got the user "scott" in a private group called "scott" as well. Adjust the "chown" line accordingly, if the user "scott" is part of another group. You can always use your favorite editor to add the "umask..." line to your login file rather than using the trusty "echo ... >> ..." method, if you need to have more control over where it goes. If you need to add a second user (say "scotts_beau"), you have to make use of groups--so "scott" and "scotts_beau" would be members of the group "privy", and you'd "chown scott.privy /private". That would give both scott and scotts_beau access to work within that directory, keeping it private from other users. Take note that if you have files within that directory with rights set to being publicly viewable, they can be read if another user knows the file names and can ask for them directly...can be the case on a multi- user system where each user has a ~/public_html folder that has to be made available to the web-server...files in there (including, perhaps, PHP/JSP/whatever source code with passwords) can be requested directly by other users on the system. HTH, -tim _______________________________________________ Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list