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Accepted
Naveen Reddy Marthala
Asked: 2020-11-15 23:42:46 +0800 CST

How to make txt, csv and pem files read and writable only by root with sudo previliges?

  • 772

I have some files inside a folder with various formats like .txt, .pem, .csv and .json.
I want only sudo/root to be able access them. I have done

chmod 700

and

chmod 600

on each of those files. But, I can still print the private key of my .pem files by doing cat on terminal without sudo privileges and open .json files from the file system in "gedit".

What has gone wrong? How do I not let anyone access the contents of those files?

command-line permissions chmod

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Suppose your file is named example.txt. Then:

    $ sudo chown root: example.txt
$ sudo chmod o-rwx example.txt

    should do the job.

    If you want an entire directory exampledir to be accessible only to root:

    $ sudo chown -R root: exampledir
$ sudo chmod -R o-rwx exampledir
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  2. Make sure that the owner of the file is root and set the permissions.
    Eg filename 'test.txt'
    Run the following command

    sudo chown root:root test.txt 
sudo chmod 700 test.txt

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