Ownership & Identity

Before changing ownership, you need to know who you are on the system. Two commands tell you:

whoami: your username

whoami

student

Simple and direct: prints just your login name.

id: full identity details

id

uid=1000(student) gid=1000(crew) groups=1000(crew),27(sudo)

This shows your user ID (uid), primary group (gid), and all groups you belong to. Groups determine which "group" permissions apply to you.

Ownership in ls -l

ls -l mission.txt

-rw-r--r-- 1 student crew 512 Jan 10 08:00 mission.txt

The two names after the link count are the owner (student) and the group (crew). The owner column determines who the "user" permissions apply to.

Why this matters

If you are not the owner of a file and not in its group, the "others" permissions apply to you. Understanding your identity helps you predict what you can and cannot do.

Mission: Identity Verification

A classified document was found in your home directory. Before anyone can access it, station protocol requires you to log your identity and lock the file down.

1. Confirm your username.
2. Save your full identity details, including your groups, into a file called identity.txt.
3. Lock down classified.doc so only the owner can read and write it, and no one else has any access.
4. Create a folder called id-check and move identity.txt into it.

Expected result

id-check/identity.txt holds your identity details, and classified.doc is -rw-------.