file permissions

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Wed, 2009-07-15 at 02:22 +0000, Amadeus W.M. wrote:
> Looking at file permissions, I see there is a . at the end of the 
> permissions. As in 
> 
> 
> [root at phoenix ~]# ls -l somefile 
> -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 2009-07-14 22:20 somefile
> 
>           ^
>         here
> 
> That's new to me. What does it mean? Where is it documented? 

>From "info coreutils 'ls invocation'":

     Following the file mode bits is a single character that specifies
     whether an alternate access method such as an access control list
     applies to the file.  When the character following the file mode
     bits is a space, there is no alternate access method.  When it is
     a printing character, then there is such a method.

     GNU `ls' uses a `.' character to indicate a file with an SELinux
     security context, but no other alternate access method.

     A file with any other combination of alternate access methods is
     marked with a `+' character.

poc