Can any one explain me abt the significance of the symbol "+" next to permissions in the below file

#ls -ltr temp1
-rw-r--r--+ 1 sharif staff 4081304 Jan 17 10:57 temp1

its there only for few files.. if u see the below case its not there

-rwxrwxr-x 1 sharif staff 30406012 Jun 30 2006 temp2

Any specific reasons???

Cheers,
Sharif.S

I am also interested to find this out.. any unix gurus out there ..

Hi Sharif,

The + signifies that there is an ACL set for the file.
ACLs or Access Control Lists which are used in Solaris and Linux, gives a user the ability to grant file permissions on a user-by-user basis.
For example, you can create a file that is readable for some users & writable for some other users.
Now, u may think that the same thing can be done rwx permissions, but ACLs provide a much higher degree of control over permissions than standard unix groups.
They are completely under the control of the owner of the file and u don't need the system administrator to create and maintain groups for you.

The two main commands you will use to manipulate ACLs are setfacl and getfacl.

For example, if I have a file named testing.c, I can set the ACL to allow the owner alone to read & write the file,

whereas the group & others has no access to the file, not even read permission,
setfacl -s user::rw-,group::---,other:--- testing.c
In the above setfacl commands, the owner gets read/write permissions (rw-) while the group and others get no permissions (---).

The user can then grant read-only access to user devoracl with:
setfacl -m user:devoracl:rw- testing.c
Similarly, permissions can be set to some other user also.

After setting the ACL on the file, note that ls shows a + after the normal permission list:
ls -l testing.c
-rw-rw----+ 1 robin staff 0 Jan 3 10:07 testing.c

To display the ACL for the file, getfacl command is used,
getfacl testing.c
user::rw-
user:devoracl:rw-
group::rw-
other:---

Hopefully the explanation & examples have cleared ur queries.

*** Innila ***