Chapter 14. Access Control Lists

Chapter 14. Access Control Lists

14.1. Mounting File Systems
14.1.1. NFS
14.2. Setting Access ACLs
14.3. Setting Default ACLs
14.4. Retrieving ACLs
14.5. Archiving File Systems With ACLs
14.6. Compatibility with Older Systems
14.7. Additional Resources
14.7.1. Installed Documentation
14.7.2. Useful Websites

Files and directories have permission sets for the owner of the file, the group associated with the file, and all other users for the system. However, these permission sets have limitations. For example, different permissions cannot be configured for different users. Thus, Access Control Lists (ACLs) were implemented.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0.0 kernel provides ACL support for the ext3 file system and NFS-exported file systems. ACLs are also recognized on ext3 file systems accessed via Samba.

Along with support in the kernel, the acl package is required to implement ACLs. It contains the utilities used to add, modify, remove, and retrieve ACL information.

The cp and mv commands copy or move any ACLs associated with files and directories.


Note: This documentation is provided {and copyrighted} by Red Hat®, Inc. and is released via the Open Publication License. The copyright holder has added the further requirement that Distribution of substantively modified versions of this document is prohibited without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. The CentOS project redistributes these original works (in their unmodified form) as a reference for CentOS-4 because CentOS-4 is built from publicly available, open source SRPMS. The documentation is unmodified to be compliant with upstream distribution policy. Neither CentOS-4 nor the CentOS Project are in any way affiliated with or sponsored by Red Hat®, Inc.