How to Share a Folder Between Local Users in Linux

Introduction

When searching for this problem, you will come across many people suggesting Samba to share folders. However, this is using a network protocol that allows other people to connect to your device. That’s not exactly what I would call locally, although it should work there too.

This guide shows how to create a shared folder without additional software and with basic GNU/Linux tools only.

Guide

This cannot easily be done in a GUI like Dolphin, so you have to use a shell.

  1. Create a new group for all users who should have access to the shared folder.

    sudo groupadd shared

  2. Add all desired users to the new group, for example user1 and user2.

    sudo usermod -a -G shared user1
sudo usermod -a -G shared user2

  3. Create the shared folder in a location every user has read access to.

    sudo mkdir /home/Shared

  4. Assign the group to the new folder.

    sudo chgrp shared /home/Shared

  5. Grant read, write, execute permissions to the owner (“root”) and the group (“shared”), all others get no access.

    The letter “s” in the group permissions sets the SetGID bit. This means that all new files and folders inside this directory inherit the parent’s group (“shared”) automatically.

    sudo chmod u=rwx,g=rwxs,o=- /home/Shared

  6. Add ACL permissions to the shared folder, essentially setting the default permissions for all new files and folders inside this directory.

    sudo setfacl -d -m u::rwx /home/Shared
sudo setfacl -d -m g::rwx /home/Shared
sudo setfacl -d -m o::- /home/Shared

Notes

To allow access to other users later, just add them to the group like in step 2.

I hope this guide was helpful to you. Please consider giving the GitHub repository a star. :)

Credits