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I have a requirement to give permissions to a folder or file to multiple groups. I can do this using acl but acl is not present on our system. What other alternative do i have?

I have to do this at runtime

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux or en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppArmor may help. They are much less obvious than regular Unix permissions. – msw Jun 25 '10 at 8:16
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  1. Create a new group. Let's call it combinedgroup
  2. Add to this group all users of the groups to whom you want to give permission.
  3. chgrp combinedgroup /path/to/folder
  4. chmod 0770 /path/to/folder (or 0750 for read-only access)
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Note: SU wants to do it at runtime – TuxGeek Jun 25 '10 at 5:49
but this will override existing group settings, my requirement is to add multiple groups to single folder – Sirish Kumar Jun 25 '10 at 6:18
@Sirish Kumar: Not really possible under *NIX permissions. – amphetamachine Jun 25 '10 at 7:25
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up vote 1 down vote

With the base unix permission system it's not possible for files or folders to have multiple groups. The one hackish way I could think of is to have a pam module that adds users of the other groups to these folders groups on login. Maybe http://sourceforge.net/projects/pam-script/ could be used for this.

I don't think it's a good idea but could be worth a try. And this assumes you have root access.

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