Unix permissions aren't that hard to understand: there's the User, the Group, & the World, & each can read and/or write and/or execute. To change permissions, use the chmod command. It's not that difficult to understand, and it's served us well for decades. But it's not perfect, because it's not as granular as is often necessary in today's complicated security world. For instance, let's say you own the file, & you want to allow Alice to read it & Bob to read and write it, but Alice & Bob are in different groups. Gulp! ACLs to the rescue.

ACL stands for "Access Control List", & it allows for a finer-grained control over file system access and usage. Windows has 'em, Mac OS X has 'em, & Linux can use 'em, but the problem is that there's no easy way to edit your ACLs. Sure, you can use the command line, but holy mackeral, it's complicated & non-intuitive. Don't believe me? Read this (& here's a simpler, kinder one, & it's still a bit complicated & non-intuitive). Egad!

Eiciel is a GUI ACL editor, built for GNOME but still runnable on KDE as long as you have the proper GNOME-ish libraries. On a Debian-based system, it's probably just a quick apt-get install eiciel away, or you can build it from source. Once installed, it's pretty darn easy & self-explanatory to use, but if you want a guide, it's there on the web site. Check this one out, fellas - it IS the future, after all.

(Check out all of our posts on ACLs.)