Do you need execute permission to navigate to a directory?

UNIX AIX
1

i have a user 'bart' which does not belong to apps group (as shown below) and i want him to be able to navigate to TEST directory.. i gave him read access but he cannot get through. when i added execute permission he was able to navigate to TEST

drwxr-xr--    3 draco     apps          4096 Apr 19 19:37 TEST

why is that? i thought read access should suffice?

by the way bart is a user from an external server

2

Yes, he does need it.

  • Read permission = permission to list the contents of a directory, but not necessarily the files in in
  • Write permission = permission to create new entries in the directory (=create new files), but not necessarily modify the existing files
  • eXecute permission = permission to chdir to the directory, but not necessarily to run the files therein

Eg. with just the read permission he may do

ls TEST/*

With just the execute permission he may cd into it, but will never see any of the files in it.

4

You might want to read one of our tutorials, written by archbishop (of the reformed SysV-church) perderabo: Unix File Permissions

It will tell you everything you need to solve this puzzle and much more you probably might want to know too about the subject.

I hope this helps.

bakunin