Russell Johns wrote:
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).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]$
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
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