[K12OSN] home directory permissions

Nils Breunese nils at breun.nl
Thu Jul 10 14:09:17 UTC 2008


Terrell Prudé Jr. wrote:

> Ernie Hudson wrote:
>>
>> Does anyone have an easy way to change the permissions on the home  
>> directories so that only the owner has access to it. We have some  
>> very bright students and they have found out that they can copy  
>> work from someone else and have more free time. I am using the 5EL  
>> and have single sign on using likewise open from my windows server  
>> using active directory. I know I can change them one at a time  
>> using “chmod 700 filename”. I am not adept at writing scripts and  
>> hoping someone can help.
>>
> Do get the basics of shell-scripting down.  I'd recommend heading  
> over to http://www.tldp.org and reading the Advanced BASH Scripting  
> Guide.  That's how I learned how to do it.  Extremely handy skill  
> and very necessary, just as important as writing .BAT or .REG files  
> on Windows.
>
> Now to your specific question.  That's pretty easy to do.  All you  
> really have to do is change the top level directory permissions  
> under /home, i. e. no recursion needed.  I'd do it like this, in a  
> basic FOR loop:
>
> #!/bin/bash
> cd /home
> for dir in *
> do
>   chmod 700 $dir
> done

Unless there are a lot of homedirs you should also be able to use this  
one-liner:

	# chmod 700 /home/*

You might also want to make sure that new users get their homedir  
permissions set up like this. I don't know where to change this off  
the top of my head right now.

Nils Breunese.




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