Example

Now, we illustrate these concepts by showing how to set up a user's home directory to allow the user to publish web pages and to develop and run CGI programs. It is assumed that the web server is configured to allow the user to do these things. Here we only look at how to create the directory structure with the correct ownerships and permissions.

Note that a properly configured web server runs as user nobody and group nobody and therefore normally has no more permissions than the least privileged user on the system. Our setup of the directories will need to take this fact into account.

For purposes of this example, we take your user name to be joeuser, your group students, and your home directory /home/joeuser. For clarity, the shell prompt will be included in the examples of user commands. The prompt is of the form dir/> where dir is the current directory (written with ~ as a shorthand to mean the home directory, /home/joeuser).