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

[V. Nyga]

Hi gurus,

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

Volkmar

[Dave La Mar]

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

Regards,

-dl

[V. Nyga]

Hi,

because they shall create directories there

V.

[Dave La Mar]

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

[Robert-Jan Goossens_1]

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

[Dave Hutton]

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.

[Peter Godron]

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.

[V. Nyga]

Well RJ,

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

;-) V.

[Dave La Mar]

"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

[V. Nyga]

dl,

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

V.

[Court Campbell]

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.

[Dave La Mar]

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

[V. Nyga]

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!

[V. Nyga]

see above