Which of the following commands would permanently fix the access issue while limiting access to IT and finance department employees?

Employees in the finance department are having trouble accessing the file /opt/work/file.

All IT employees can read and write the file.

Systems administrator reviews the following output:

Which of the following commands would permanently fix the access issue while limiting access to IT and finance department employees?
A . chattr +i file
B . chown it:finance file
C . chmod 666 file
D .   setfacl -m g:finance:rw file

View Answer

Answer: D

Explanation:

The command setfacl -m g:finance:rw file will permanently fix the access issue while limiting access to IT and finance department employees. The setfacl command is a tool for modifying the access control lists (ACLs) of files and directories on Linux systems. The ACLs are a mechanism that allows more fine-grained control over the permissions of files and directories than the traditional owner-group-others model. The -m option specifies the modification to the ACL. The g:finance:rw means that the group named finance will have read and write permissions on the file. The file is the name of the file to modify, in this case /opt/work/file. The command setfacl -m g:finance:rw file will add an entry to the ACL of the file that will grant read and write access to the finance group. This will fix the access issue and allow the finance employees to access the file. The command will also preserve the existing permissions of the file, which means that the IT employees will still have read and write access to the file. This will limit the access to IT and finance department employees and prevent unauthorized access from other users. This is the correct command to use to accomplish the task. The other options are incorrect because they either do not fix the access issue (chattr +i file or chown it:finance file) or do not limit the access to IT and finance department employees (chmod 666 file).

References: CompTIA Linux+ (XK0-005) Certification Study Guide, Chapter 11: Managing File Permissions and Ownership, page 352.