chmod is driving me nuts

[nihil]

okay, i'm having a bit of a problem with permissions and ownership of a certain file.

i have an ftp set up and user blah has their home dir set to /home/blah
in /home/blah is a file called foo.txt.
now, how would i set permissions so that the user "blah" would be able to view the file and do nothing else.
all i want is to set the persmissions so that they can't delete the file or modify it in any way, and it doesn't seem to be working no matter what i try.

i've read the chmod and chown manuals about 100 times. and tried about 50 different combinations but no matter what i do i can still log in as user blah and just delete /home/blah/foo.txt.

tia.

 

[LNXman]

You could try using chown so that user blah does not own it and the file does not have write permissions on it (for that user, or the groups the user may belong to). ALA the user owns the file, he/she can do whatever he/she wants to it.

 

[marat]

Here is the problem

1. File should not be owned by user - or he can set permissions he want
2. Permission should be set for 1 user only, right?

Here is a way:

su root

cd /home

chown -R root.blah blah - make all file owned by root and group blah

chmod -R 600 blah - make all files innaccessible by any user other than by root

chmod 650 blah - let user blah read directoty content

chmod 640 blah/foo.txt - let user read file foo.txt

 

[nihil]

thanks guys. i finally figured out the correlation between chown and chmod. i think i was totally overlooking something. it's been a long day. brain is melted. thanks again!

 

[Nothinman]

Also remember that if the user can write to the directory, the user can delete the file even if he can't write to the file.