Why Was: US Military Dead during Iraq War 1817

A few points I'm not sure anyone else addressed (all "as far as I know", since in this group I hesitate to try to speak with authority):

A directory is exactly as self-contained as any other file (in fact, in one view, it *is* a file, of a specific type); like them, it consists of an inode that contains, among other things, ownership and permissions info, plus whatever is needed to find the blocks on disk that make up the file.

In order to get at a file (for reading or writing), you have to have permission to access all the directories in the path to it, and you have to have permission to access the file itself. Experiment suggests that there's no way to evade this by making links, either hard or symbolic. The only thing that's a little strange is that permission to delete a file depends on having write access to the directory in which it appears, which might or might not correspond to having write access to the file.

So I think the overall scheme might be a little more secure than you think,BAH, though it does have its quirks and limitations, among them the inability to keep the superuser (root) out of users' files. That sounds like it would be nice to have.

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.