Lesson 13—Manage Permissions and Sharing

Question 1

How do you identify the ownership and permissions of a file or folder in the Finder?

Answer 1

You can use the Finder Info window to identify an item’s ownership and permissions. In the Finder, you can open the Get Info window of each file or folder and find the permissions of each. Each file and folder has owner, group, and everyone permission settings.

Question 2

Which ownership tiers are used with POSIX-style permissions to separately define specific privilege rules for each file and folder?

Answer 2

• Owner—By default, an item owner is the user who created the item or copied it to the Mac.
• Group—By default, the group permissions for an item are inherited from the folder it was created in.
• Everyone—This permission defines access for anyone who isn’t the owner and isn’t part of the item’s group.

Question 3

How do access control lists (ACLs) differ from standard UNIX file system permissions?

Answer 3

ACLs expand the standard UNIX permissions architecture to allow more file and folder access control. macOS has adopted a style of ACLs similar to what’s available on Windows-based NTFS and UNIX file systems.

Question 4

How does the default organization of the file system let users safely share local files and folders?

Answer 4

Every home folder contains a Public folder that other users can read and a Dropbox folder that other users can write to. All other subfolders in a user’s home folder (except the optional Sites folder) have default permissions that don’t allow access to other users. The Shared folder is also set for all users to share items.

Question 5

What’s unique about the permissions of the /Users/Shared folder?

Answer 5

The Shared folder lets local users read and write files, but only the owner can delete it from the Shared folder. This folder’s “sticky bit” permissions setting prevents other users from deleting files that they don’t own.