Going all control-freak on a Samba share and trying to finely slice-and-dice file permissions is the path to madness. Charlie Schluting has some sensible ideas on managing file permissions on your fileserver.

The traditional file permission model, where read, write, and execute permissions are set on each file for the user, group, and others (UGO) has one drawback: It can't be used to define per-user or per-group permissions. For that, you need to employ access control lists (ACL). Eiciel is a graphical tool that integrates with the Nautilus file manager and allows for easy ACL management.

In Windows they are used for a long time already, but most Linux-users probably don't even know that their system supports them too. Access Control Lists (ACLs) extend the regular permissions we all know with the possibility to give permissions for specific users/groups.

Yesterday I wrote about PCMan File Manager, which among other things offers better control over file permissions. Commenter Gavintlgold pointed out that’s it’s possible to get a similar dialog in Nautilus by changing a hidden setting in GNOME.

Recently on Tombuntu there's a post which tells you how to Enable the Advanced File Permissions Dialog in Nautilus by issuing the command in a terminal. If you feel more comfortable to achieve the goal through a GUI way. Here you go:

The chmod command lets you change the access permissions of files and directories. shows several chmod command lines and how access to the directory or file changes.

If you read my article "Get to know Linux: File permissions" you know that it's possible, out of the box, to control who can access a file and what they can do with it. This helps to make Linux a fairly secure system. But did you know you can take even further control of that system with the help of Access Control Lists?

A guide to understanding file permissions in gnu/linux.

You may be faced with a situation in which you must figure out who has permissions to a file or directory and what those permissions are. This sounds simple enough. It really is not as simple as it may sound, here is an example. You view the contents of the /var/www (/var/www/html in CentOS) directory where your web site content is found and you see a directory that looks like this:
Ubuntu