Allow user access to home directory of another

user
User's creation was covered by question 008

Question:
Allow davis (and only davis) to get full access to john's home directory.

(scroll down for an answer)

Answer:
Usually the system operates only on file/folder user owner and group owner. The default
settings for users is that the files and folders created by that user are given ownership (user
and group) of the creating user.

This question is somehow problematic to me. From the way it is constructed it seems that
simple:

chown -R davis:davis /home/john

chmod -R 700 /home/john

should suffice.

In order to extend the possibility to add additional users to be able to operate on folders and
files there is a concept of ACL. They are set using the command setfacl.

In the given case we can use below command to achieve what we want (however this adds the
ownership not replaces it)

setfacl -R -m u:davis:rwx /home/john

To check what is the status of ACLs on the file/home we use getfacl /home/john.

Above commands are changing existing files and folders (with -R making it recursive).
However if we want to make it applicable to the new files and folders there must be d: (default)
prefix used. So the final command should look like:

setfacl -R -m d:u:davis:rwx /home/john

Additional comment:
ACLs are indicated by the '+' (plus) sign at the end of the owning folder (this is the listing
from /home folder):

drwxrwx---+ 7 davis davis 176 Jun 27 16:23 john

For the partition to be able to use ACLs it must be mounted with acl mount property

Removal of ACLs is achieved also via setfacl command but with proper flag (see man pages for
examples)