Bear with me please: In W2K you can assign permissions for a file or folder based upon the user name. You can set a different permission for all persons granted access. i.e.: John - read Betty - read / write Mark - fullaccess Susie - write In Linux I am looking to do the same thing, but I can only find info on "owner, guest, other" and groups. It would not be efficient for me to make that many groups. Any ideas?

Have you ever heard of sudo? I believe if you are root you can do something with sudo to give them permissions... But I'm not sure about this. Any of you guys know anything about sudo? And if you do is this right?

read the manpages of chown and chmod, especially the sections about suid and uid bits. the owner-group-world permission system allows a quite sophisticated control over files and directories. (you know that users can belong to multiple groups ?). well, if you need control over _real_ large networks you might consider using netware. but most situations can easily be handled with the unix file permission system. well, at least i havent reached its limits yet.