Give specific user permission to write to a folder using +w notation

Question

I know I can assign the permission to write to an owner/group/others like this:

chmod u+w myfolder

Can I specify the specific user here? Some like this:

chmod username u+w myfolder

Answer 1

You could use setfacl:

setfacl -m u:username:rwx myfolder

This sets permissions for specific users, without changing the ownership of the directory.

Check out the man page for further details and examples.

Note:

• setfacl is short for set File ACL (Access Control List)

• If you want to apply it recursively to all the subdirectories: add the -R flag like this:

  setfacl -R -m u:username:rwx myfolder
  

Answer 2

If you want to change the user owning this file or directory (folder), you will have to use the command chown. For instance, if you run

sudo chown username: myfolder

the user owning myfolder will be username. Then you can execute

sudo chmod u+w myfolder

to add the write permission to the username user.

But if you want to add this user to the group associated with "myfolder", you can run

sudo usermod -a -G groupname username

and then execute

sudo chmod g+w myfolder

to add the write permission to the group.

Answer 3

No this is not possible. You can either change the owner of the file with

[sudo] chown username: foldername

or you can add the user to the group that owns the file with

usermod -a -G {group-name} username

Answer 4

If you want to apply it recursively to all the subdirectories: add the -R flag like this:

setfacl -R -m u:username:rwx myfolder

Answer 5

In Ubuntu recursively (folder and it's all sub folders) giving permission to a specific user:

sudo chown -R <username>: <folderName>