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Re: ACLs



On Tue, 28 Apr 1998, Alex Shnitman wrote:

> Hi.
> 
> I've just read that AIX has ACLs (Access Control Lists), which allow the
> administrator to set individually for each device file (and maybe other
> resources too) who has the right to do what with it, on a user-to-user
> basis. Is anyone familiar with it? Did I describe correctly what are they? 
> What other systems support ACLs? Does Linux?

ACL's allow the administrator (or the owner in some cases, depending on
the OS) to define access permissions on a user granularity. What this
means, in plain English, is that I can make a file readable to all, and
explicitly deny access to any user or group I wish, or vice versa.

ACLs, in theory, refer to any object that has access permissions, in Linux
those would be files (everything under userland Unix can be represented as
a file last I looked.), in NT those would be system objects.

The unices that support ACL's are AFAIK DG-UX, AIX, and HP-UX, at
least officially. NT supports ACLs. I believe I've seen a Linux ACL patch,
I just don't recall where. It's, ofcourse, a kernel patch, so start by
looking at kernel patch repositories.

ACLs AFAIK are not POSIX compliant, but I might be, and I'm probably, very
wrong at this. Feel free to correct me.

Regards,
Nir.



 > 
> ---
> Alex Shnitman ...................... alexsh@linux.org.il
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--
Nir Soffer AKA ScorpioS. scorpios@cs.huji.ac.il
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