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Access Control Lists (commonly known as ACLs) are a way of specifying complicated permissions to objects.

Those of you from the UNIX world may remember when you have been in a situation like the following:

Techies need read/write to a directory. Marketing needs read. Joe needs full access.

This is an impossible scenario with classic owner/group/others permissions. You can't have two groups that need two different permissions. With ACLs you can!

The basics for using ACLs on ext2/3 partitions is:

  • Having a patched kernel to allow it
  • Having the ACL utilities
  • Having a slightly modified version of fileutils.

It is also important to have a recent version of e2fsck otherwise it'll cnut your ACLs.