How to give permissions to a subfolder while denying access to folders above it

Question

I have this structure:

/home/the_user/folder/subfolder

and I would like to have read and write access to it, but I want to be unable to read or write anything above it, that is

/home/the_user/folder

Is that possible?

Answer 1

It's better to do this in a location other than home such as creating the folder structure in / but here it goes:

Set the owner of subfolder as the user you want to have read and write permissions.

chown user /home/the_user/folder/subfolder
chmod u+rwx /home/the_user/folder/subfolder

Set execute for others on /home the_user and folder and make sure that there is no read and write for the user.

chmod +x for each of them and chmod -rw for the user.

That will allow the user to traverse the above directories but not read them or write to them while allowing him to read and write to subfolder.

Once again, I recommend against doing this in /home and suggest that you create the directory as a subfolder of root such as:

mkdir /mnt/folder

....and use my answer there instead of potentially making a mistake and giving permissions to someone's home directory.

Answer 2

Another approach is to mount the folder to a folder the user have access to.

Say we have the folder /home/the_user/folder/subfolder you want to show to user cat without disclosing anything else in your home:

mkdir /home/cat/subfolder
chown cat /home/the_user/folder/subfolder
sudo mount -o bind /home/the_user/folder/subfolder  /home/cat/subfolder

Should do the trick.