Russell Johns wrote:
> H-
>
> forgive my ignorance, but I'm not understanding whats going wrong here
> ...
> essentially a large file that I own I can't delete...
> why do I not have permission to delete this file???
>
> [rcj@Merak2 Archive]$ rm rcj.iso
> rm: cannot remove `rcj.iso': Permission denied
> [rcj@Merak2 Archive]$ chmod 777 rcj.iso
> [rcj@Merak2 Archive]$ rm rcj.iso
> rm: cannot remove `rcj.iso': Permission denied
> [rcj@Merak2 Archive]$ ls -l
> total 423972
> -rwxrwxrwx 1 rcj xcdroast 433717248 Oct 21 10:39 rcj.iso
> [rcj@Merak2 Archive]$ chown rcj.rcj rcj.iso
> [rcj@Merak2 Archive]$ rm rcj.iso
> rm: cannot remove `rcj.iso': Permission denied
> [rcj@Merak2 Archive]$ rm -f rcj.iso
> rm: cannot remove `rcj.iso': Permission denied
> [rcj@Merak2 Archive]$
>
>
In Unix, when you "remove" a regular file, you are removing a link
(rcj.iso) that refers to the file (remember that files can have multiple
"hard" links); when the file has no more links remaining, the file itself
is removed (after all openers of the file have closed it).
Permission to remove a link to a file is determined by the security of the
directory containing the link ("Archive" in your case). You must have
write permission to a directory in order to create or remove entries in
that directory. Additionally, if the "sticky" bit is on in a directory's
mode (ls -ld <directory> shows "t" as the last character of the
directory's mode string) then you must be root or must be the owner of the
file referred to by a link in order to be able to remove the link. /tmp
often has the sticky bit set to prevent users from being able to unlink
other users' temporary files.
Hope that helps.
-Tom
--
Tom Eastep \ Shorewall - iptables made easy
AIM: tmeastep \ http://www.shorewall.net
ICQ: #60745924 \ teastep@shorewall.net
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