After using Linux every day for 3 years today I learned that listing directories requires the execute permission.

In a misdirected attempt to solve my problems I also learned the basic concepts of SELinux before realising that SELinux is disabled on the host and not present on the guest.

I learned that in my Linux newbie days, but came to truly appreciate it when setting up private Samba shares.

And while setting up those, I also learned about sticky permissions. Amazingly useful.

Me who uses linux very ocasionally and rarely need to manage files. But who grew with MS DOS and Norton Commander :

SSH moi@myLinux

sudo mc

(And yes. I use nano as editor and not ashamed!)

Edit : the ONLY thing I still have no idea is how space is managed. Drive has 75GB free (According to mc). Downloading a 50GB torrent : "no space" ? what ?

@NoToJavaScript on windows you rarely create partitions and its hard to make the user home on an seperate partition. On linux you usually have everything on 4 or more partitions. The root (C:\windows) can have 75 gigs free but since your home is on a different partition you can't use this free space.

Yeah that thing is a bit misleading. Also why the capital X is so handy in chmod.
You might find it interesting to look at posix ACL. This is probably the extra control you where looking for and it is often enabled by default.

@stop

To be fair, Symbolic Links (Or whatever the real name is, it is faster to write than to google) are supported from Windows NT 4.11 (Or 4.10).

But no one (Except windows, they are on fire for “documents” etc). uses them. And I really don’t know why !

Other example : Multiple stream support in NTFS. You know pop up “This file was downloaded…” ? It is actually an alternative stream value, placed by windows on every file which doesn’t originate in a “Trusted” (Don’t start on this) network.

But soooo few people even know NTFS can do that, I can hide a 1GB file into 1B text file lol.

@NoToJavaScript i thought that the download marker was an extended attribute.

@hjk101 I was looking for the ability to list a diretory, but thanks for the keyword I might research it later. It sounds like it's a bit more standard than SELinux.

@hjk101 I read up, POSIX ACLs are a very streamlined extension to the existing FS model that is definitely worth knowing, thanks for the pointer.

@stop I didn't recheck since Windows XP. Maybe they changed, the point stays valid, there a lot of things NTFS does which very few people use

@NoToJavaScript If Explorer doesn't do it, it's as good as impossible.

@NoToJavaScript If you wanted to use the command line, you probably switched to Linux or Mac a long time ago because Windows was trying to move users away from the command line by providing an abysmal default and there was no good alternative. More recently they did create a good terminal, but most of the power users are gone so to popularise any (file system) feature they need a button for it.