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I am trying to change the permissions for the symbolic link.

Making directory and symbolic link

As how you can see in the image, the soft link has 777 permissions, but i would like to change that.

I tried to change that by:

  1. chmod 755 someLink - but this changes linked directory (someDir) permission.
  2. chmod -h 755 someLink - this brings eroor chmod: invalid option --'h'

Is there a way how to change symbolic link permissions? I am on Ubuntu 18.04

Many thanks in advance

guntbert
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ph7
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1 Answers1

25

While not an exact duplicate, this answer should provide a hint:

$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 vidarlo users 0 May 21 19:10 a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 vidarlo users 1 May 21 19:10 b -> a
$ chmod 755 b
$ ls -la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 vidarlo users 0 May 21 19:10 a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 vidarlo users 1 May 21 19:10 b -> a

In short: symlinks does not have permissions. Anyone can read where the symlink points to. The permissions of the target determines the access.

As Rinzwind points out, the -h flag is for *BSD versions of chmod. It does not work on GNU versions of chmod.

vidarlo
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