topic Re: Is it possible to allow dir creation but NOT file creation in a dir in Operating System - HP-UX

Is it possible to allow dir creation but NOT file creation in a dir

V. Nyga — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:01:34 GMT

Hi gurus,

is it possible to allow a user to create a directory in one directory but disable file creation in this dir?

Volkmar

Re: Is it possible to allow dir creation but NOT file creation in a dir

Dave La Mar — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:04:05 GMT

Why would not changing ownership and removing write priviledge not work?

Regards,

-dl

Re: Is it possible to allow dir creation but NOT file creation in a dir

V. Nyga — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:09:26 GMT

Hi,

because they shall create directories there

V.

Re: Is it possible to allow dir creation but NOT file creation in a dir

Dave La Mar — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:14:07 GMT

Now I've got the picture. Tough one since to Unix a directory is simply a file as well.

Best of luck on this.

-dl

Re: Is it possible to allow dir creation but NOT file creation in a dir

Robert-Jan Goossens_1 — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:14:38 GMT

Hi Vo,

No not possible, if you (the user) is allowed to write inside a directory unix will allow the creation of files and directories.

Education of the users is only option :-)

Gruss.
Robert-Jan

Re: Is it possible to allow dir creation but NOT file creation in a dir

Dave Hutton — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:18:40 GMT

Probably ugly, but you might be able to sudo mkdir as root, so the permissions on the directory they wouldn't have.

Only way I think it may be remotely possible.

Re: Is it possible to allow dir creation but NOT file creation in a dir

Peter Godron — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:18:41 GMT

Volkmar,
quick, but not very permanent way is to set the umask of user to 222.

That way they can create the dir (r-xr-xr-x), but within the dir they can not create a file as no write permission.
They user however could override by doing a chmod on the dir first.

Re: Is it possible to allow dir creation but NOT file creation in a dir

V. Nyga — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:22:04 GMT

Well RJ,

then any good suggestions for an applicable user education? *49*

;-) V.

Re: Is it possible to allow dir creation but NOT file creation in a dir

Dave La Mar — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:39:58 GMT

"then any good suggestions for an applicable user education? *49*"

Well, a bit nasty, but we have had to resort to this in the past; run a cron job (or daemon) to check the directory for regular (and binary) files periodicaly, change ownership and permission.
This forces the user to come to you to help release his/her "unauthorized" file.

Regards,

-dl

Re: Is it possible to allow dir creation but NOT file creation in a dir

V. Nyga — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:53:22 GMT

dl,

not bad - do you have more informations (cron command)?

V.

Re: Is it possible to allow dir creation but NOT file creation in a dir

Court Campbell — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:10:27 GMT

I like the sudo idea. make the directory owned by some account other than the users. this keeps them from creating any file without using sudo. then write a script to mkdir under that directory. ex. put the following in file:

#!/bin/sh
sudo -u dir_owner mkir /path/to/dir/${1}

then just have the users run that script when they need to make a directory under that specific directory.

Re: Is it possible to allow dir creation but NOT file creation in a dir

Dave La Mar — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:38:48 GMT

Ok.
Here's a down and dirty that can be edited to fit your needs.

for i in `ls /directory/path/`
do
if [ -f $i ]
then
chown someone:whatever /directory/path/$i
chmod 400 /directory/path/$i
fi
done

Best of luck.

Regards,

-dl

Re: Is it possible to allow dir creation but NOT file creation in a dir

V. Nyga — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 04:27:35 GMT

Thanks all

sudo will not work, because the directory creation is made by an application (not mine).
Nevertheless it's a nice idea ...

This application is also the reason for my question - it creates the (sub-)dir's for the user, but sometimes something fails, so the application lays the files in this dir instead of creating the subdir and laying the files in the subdir.
Maybe the vendor can do something ...

Thanks again!

Re: Is it possible to allow dir creation but NOT file creation in a dir

V. Nyga — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 05:46:05 GMT

see above