Unix permissions

Question

I have a file of which I need to change contents, that has these permissions:

-rw-r--r-- 

How do I find out which permissions group I belong to, so I can do a chmod command?

I just tried to do chmod and I got an error:

$ chmod 777 hosts
chmod: Unable to change file mode on hosts: Operation not permitted

Here is my ls -l

-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  313 Apr 16 13:04 hosts

Solution 1

'ls -l' will tell you all you need to know.

Permissions Directories Group   Size    Date            Directory or file 
drwx------  2           users   4096    Nov 2 19:51     mail/

If you have root permission, try a 'sudo chmod 777 hosts'.

Solution 2

You are probably not the owner of the file.

Solution 3

the owner of the file will need to change permissions or change ownership by using chown,

here are some examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chown

Solution 4

If you have a super user's password you could always :

$ sudo chmod 777 hosts

which, of course, is never a very good idea.

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