Permissions question

jtnelson at genuity.net jtnelson at genuity.net
Tue Aug 1 13:39:23 EDT 2000


I have wondered this for a while and have not found much documentation on it:

$ chmod 0775 foo
$ ls -l foo
   0 -rwxrwxr-x   1 jason    admin           0 Jun  9 09:08 foo*
$ chmod 1775 foo
$ ls -l foo
   0 -rwxrwxr-t   1 jason    admin           0 Jun  9 09:08 foo*
$ chmod 2775 foo
$ ls -l foo
   0 -rwxrwsr-x   1 jason    admin           0 Jun  9 09:08 foo*
$ chmod 3775 foo
$ ls -l foo
   0 -rwxrwsr-t   1 jason    admin           0 Jun  9 09:08 foo*
$ chmod 4775 foo
$ ls -l foo
   0 -rwsrwxr-x   1 jason    admin           0 Jun  9 09:08 foo*
$ chmod 5775 foo
$ ls -l foo
   0 -rwsrwxr-t   1 jason    admin           0 Jun  9 09:08 foo*
$ chmod 6775 foo
$ ls -l foo
   0 -rwsrwsr-x   1 jason    admin           0 Jun  9 09:08 foo*
$ chmod 7775 foo
$ ls -l foo
   0 -rwsrwsr-t   1 jason    admin           0 Jun  9 09:08 foo*

I believe it's called the sticky bit and it ranges from 0-7, but I haven't found documentation on what each 
value means.  I usually use something like chmod 2775 foo to allow multiple users to write to a directory but not delete each others stuff (i.e. for a shared samba dir).  But not sure what effect each value really has.

Thanks in advance,
Jason Nelson
Genuity Inc.
VPN and Internet Security Analyst
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