Sorry, User permissions is a miss-leading title, I should have given this a title of “Folder Permissions”, but the movie was completed before I realized my mistake. These same permissions apply to files as well as folders.

To prevent any user on the system from being able to view our files in our home file, we change the permissions.

In video FromXPtoLinux (28), we saw that user Jill could view any files in my home folder, Jack can as well. One thought to prevent that from happening is to encrypt the home folder but, since we are the root user, we would need to reinstall Linux Mint Mate to encrypt the home folder, besides, the reason we did not encrypt the home folder was because we wanted to be able to access the files, if for some reason, we can't login.

The first thing we do is we go into the preferences and show the permissions for the files.

The permissions for my home folder are drwxr-xr-x the first letter explains this is a directory, the next three letters are for the owners permissions, meaning the owner can Read, Write, (meaning change, update, and delete files), and eXecute files in this folder.

The next three characters are for the group (will will talk about this in the next video) the group can read and eXectue files, but not Write (meaning edit, update, or delete and files in this folder).

The last three characters are for anyone else on the system, and we can see anyone can read and execute files in my home folder, so I want to change these.

We change the permissions by right clicking on the folder, clicking on properties, then the permissions tab, we set the "others" or all users permissions to no access, then we login as Jill and show that she can no-longer view my files.

We log back in as Michael and look at the Octal permissions and see that d for directory translates to 40 and a – or non directory file translates to 100 (there are other options for this character, but we will not be looking at them in this video).

The numeric values are Read = 4, Write = 2, Execute = 1, and we show the owner has an octal permission of 7 (4+2+1), a group that has read and execute permissions has an octal permission of 5 (4+0+1) and users with no permissions have an octal permission of 0