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I have an application installed in /etc/mydir.

I have executed the following to remove the ability for users to execute this program.

chown root:group1 /etc/mydir -R
chmod 700 /etc/mydir -R

I created a new user and logged in as this user. The new user was not added to group1 However, I was able to execute this program by just typing the program name.

How can I stop users being able to run this using chmod and chown. Please let me know.

PS. the new users cannot cd into /etc/mydir but they can still execute using the program name.

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    The executed program probably isn't actually in /etc/mydir. Try which programname and type programname (if bash is your shell) to determine what actually gets called when you type programname.
    – Daniel Beck ♦
    Nov 8, 2013 at 21:55
  • @DanielBeck Thank you! The alias to the program was actually pointing to a file in /usr/libexec/mydir. Once I ran chown and chmod on this folder, it worked as expected. I could have marked it as an answer if you typed it below. Thanks for your time!
    – thilina R
    Nov 8, 2013 at 22:08
  • It's not too late for that :-)
    – Daniel Beck ♦
    Nov 9, 2013 at 5:29

1 Answer 1

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You need to find out what actually happens when you type the name of the program:

Use which <programname> to determine the location of the executable that gets executed when you type <programname>, which will be the first hit when trying the directories listed in the PATH environment in order. Use echo $PATH to find out where the shell looks for executables to run.

And just to be sure that your (bash) shell does not interfere, run type <programname> to find out whether aliases or functions are defined.

These will tell you that you're not actually running a program from the inaccessible directory, but from somewhere else.

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