I am the only person with access to my machine. Any reasons to enable group/other permissions on files and directories?

Question

I have noticed that some files in my home directory have read and write permissions for group and even other.

If I am the only person who I want to give access to my machine, is there any reason to enable group or other permissions for files or directories?

Answer 1

It depends on the file or directory.

For example, some web server setups allow the machine's users to publish files as http://server.name/~username, with the files typically living in that user's subdirectory. httpd will probably need execute permissions on the directory containing the files and all of the directories above it in the path, due to the way it processes URLs. In other words, if you have ~username/public_html set to 777, but ~username is 700, Apache probably can't serve the files.

The broader answer to the question requires you to consider all the daemons running in the system. They typically do not run as either root or your user, so they do not automatically have permissions for any files in your directory unless given them explicitly.