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Accepted
Max Koretskyi
Asked: 2014-06-25 02:33:16 +0800 CST

Give specific user permission to write to a folder using +w notation

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I know I can assign the permission to write to an owner/group/others like this:

chmod u+w myfolder

Can I specify the specific user here? Some like this:

chmod username u+w myfolder
permissions

5 Answers

  1. You could use setfacl:

    setfacl -m u:username:rwx myfolder

    This sets permissions for specific users, without changing the ownership of the directory.

    Check out the man page for further details and examples.

    Note:

    • setfacl is short for set File ACL (Access Control List)

    • If you want to apply it recursively to all the subdirectories: add the -R flag like this:

      setfacl -R -m u:username:rwx myfolder
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  2. Best Answer

    If you want to change the user owning this file or directory (folder), you will have to use the command chown. For instance, if you run

    sudo chown username: myfolder

    the user owning myfolder will be username. Then you can execute

    sudo chmod u+w myfolder

    to add the write permission to the username user.

    But if you want to add this user to the group associated with "myfolder", you can run

    sudo usermod -a -G groupname username

    and then execute 

    sudo chmod g+w myfolder

    to add the write permission to the group.

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  3. No this is not possible. You can either change the owner of the file with

    [sudo] chown username: foldername

    or you can add the user to the group that owns the file with

    usermod -a -G {group-name} username
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  4. If you want to apply it recursively to all the subdirectories: add the -R flag like this: 

    setfacl -R -m u:username:rwx myfolder
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  5. In Ubuntu recursively (folder and it's all sub folders) giving permission to a specific user:

    sudo chown -R <username>: <folderName>
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