Coming from a Windows background, one of the first differences I stumbled across while learning to administrate a Linux server .. was the concept of permissions, which includes the topic of file & directory ownership.
Permissions is not a very romantic subject, so I won't bore you with geeky details. But failing to understand how they work can keep your scripts from running.
And even when you *do* understand .. they can still cause problems. (Uh, more on that later.)
I mean, used incorrectly, chmod (the unix command that sets permissions on files & directories) .. can even trash your whole server .. when used to do things like I'm trying to do ..
.. which is to effect changes to the permissions of ALL the files & directories contained within a certain master-directory. With great-power comes great-danger. (Think thermo-nuclear.)
I almost ran this directory-wide command from the wrong directory. That woulda been ugly. No easy way to recover. (Shoot me now.) But I caught myself. (It was late & I was tired.)
Used to be .. I was always on *high-alert* when working with/in the shell. But now that I've become more comfortable there, I've lost that sense of painstaking-vigilance I used to have. (Fear of trashing the server.)
Linux (a variant of Unix) recognizes 3 types of users »
- the owner (.. of the file/script/directory/folder. That's me.)
- a group member (.. formally assigned as such. Generally people you know & trust.)
- everybody else (.. including the dregs of society. Others.)
Here it might help to visualize a 3x4 grid, with 12 possible values. Based on our permission settings, each one of these 3 types of users can do 1 or more (or none) of 3 possible actions:
- nothing (.. no action permitted)
- read (.. the file or directory-contents)
- write (.. to the file/script or directory)
- execute (.. the script)
» MODx Revolution CMS has Arrived
Now, if you've been faithfully following along, you know I've been learning to program with PHP. (Happy holidays, by the way.)
And one of the reasons I want to learn PHP is cuz of the (very cool) » MODx CMS.
[ CMS = Content Management System. ]
The coding studs at MODx have released a new version (2.0) called » Revolution, which was built from scratch, using all the latest/coolest stuff (technologies). Always nice to start from scratch with the latest technologies, tho normally impractical. (If I could start over .. the site, with what I know now. Ooh la la!)