[Samba] None

[John H Terpstra]

On Wed, 7 May 2003, Daniel Eischen wrote:

> On Thu, 8 May 2003, John H Terpstra wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 8 May 2003 jra at dp.samba.org wrote:
> >
> > > On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 02:22:00AM +0000, John H Terpstra wrote:
> > > > On Tue, 6 May 2003, Joseph Leipert wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > I have Question, I have a school running on samba. I want none of the
> > > > > users to have the right to delete files, but they must be able to write
> > > > > to the files. How do I do that?
> > > >
> > > > You sure do have a question here!
> > > >
> > > > Under Unix/Linux the right to write to a file means the right and ability
> > > > to delete the file. If you can get that changed, then we can accommodate
> > > > your request. Until then, we live and die by the operating system we live
> > > > on top of.
> > >
> > > Errr, actually no - UNIX *can* do this. The ability to delete a file is
> > > held in the *directory* the file is contained in, not the file itself.
> >
> > Doh! So true! Thanks Jeremy.
>
> I'm interpreting the question a bit, but I would think the
> original poster would want the ability to create _new_ files.
> Wouldn't this disallow creation of new files?

Another good point. If the directory is read-only, but files within it are
writeable, then the file can be written to and it can be deleted. But new
files can not be created.

Also, note, that MS Word and other MS Office applications will fail also.
This is because when writing changes to a file they will try to create a
new file with a temporary name, then when the file is written it will
delete the original file and rename the temporary file to the original
name.

So, if the directory the file is in is read-only, there are lots of
potential gotchas!

I will be sure to document this in the new Samba-HOWTO-Collection.

- John T.
-- 
John H Terpstra
Email: jht at samba.org