Posts tagged with “command-line

Changing ownership with chown

Need to CHange the OWNer of a file or directory? chown [new owner] [file or directory] If, for example, I wanted to change the owner of /var/www/vhosts/my_website/tmp to “root” I’d run this: chown root /var/www/vhosts/my_website/tmp If you want to apply the ownership change recursively — that is, to all subdirectories and/or files within — add […]

The Tar basics

Tar is a compression utility used to generate a single archive, known as a “tarball”, out of multiple files and subdirectories. It can also be used, inversely, to extract these same subdirectories and files out of the archive. I want to create a tarball: tar cvf [archive-name].tar [source-directory] Here’s what the options mean: c = […]

Removing a non-empty directory

It’s fine to use rmdir [dir name] for empty directories. But if you’re looking to remove a non-empty directory, you need recursion: rm -rf [dir name] Use with caution — you will not be prompted to verify!

Changing permissions with chmod

Here’s the syntax for CHanging permissions or MODe — also known as chmod — for files and directories: chmod [permissions] /path/to/file/or/directory The three possible users are: file owner group of authorized users everyone else (a.k.a. “the world”) The possible actions (and associated binary values) are: 4: read 2: write 1: execute Total the values for […]