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I have a folder /home/samantha/folder that I want to share with the user tom. He can read/write the folder. How do I do that?

chown wouldn't do it because I still want to be able to be the owner of the folder. I don't see how to do this with chmod either.

slhck
  • 235,242
Zenet
  • 695

2 Answers2

64

If you are using Linux with a relatively modern filesystem (ext3/ext4, btrfs, ntfs), this can be done with POSIX ACLs:

  1. Enable ACLs for the filesystem. This is only necessary for ext3 and ext4 on kernels older than 2.6.38. All other filesystems that support ACLs enable them automatically.

    mount -o remount,acl /
tune2fs -o acl /dev/<partition>

  2. Give tom access to the folder:

    setfacl -m user:tom:rwx /home/samantha/folder

If the OS or the filesystem does not support ACLs, another way is to use groups.

  1. Create a group.

    • Some Linux distributions create a separate group for each user: tom would automatically be in a group also named tom.

    • If not, create a group. This should work on Linux...

      groupadd tom
gpasswd -a tom tom

      ...and this - on BSD:

      groupadd tom
usermod -G tom tom

  2. chgrp the directory to that group, and give permissions with chmod:

     chgrp tom /home/samantha/folder
 chmod g+rwx /home/samantha/folder
grawity
  • 501,077
3

Add both users to a common group. Make that group own the directory, and assign group permissions as needed.