Privileges and Permissions for Users¶
We will be referring to permissions to the ability of a user to access and perform changes on the relevant parts of the host’s filesystem, starting/stopping services and installing software.
By privileges we refer to the abilities of a database user to perform different kinds of actions on the database server.
At a system level¶
There are many ways for checking the permission on a file or directory. For example, ls -ls /path/to/file or stat /path/to/file | grep Access will do the job:
$ stat /etc/mysql | grep Access
You should see results similar to the following:
Access: (0755/drwxr-xr-x) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root)
Access: 2011-05-12 21:19:07.129850437 -0300
$ ls -ld /etc/mysql/my.cnf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4703 Apr 5 06:26 /etc/mysql/my.cnf
As in this example, my.cnf is owned by root and not writable for anyone else. Assuming that you do not have root ‘s password, you can check what permissions you have on this types of files with sudo -l:
$ sudo -l
Password:
You may run the following commands on this host:
(root) /usr/bin/
(root) NOPASSWD: /etc/init.d/mysqld
(root) NOPASSWD: /bin/vi /etc/mysql/my.cnf
(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/local/bin/top
(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/ls
(root) /bin/tail
Being able to execute with sudo scripts in /etc/init.d/, /etc/rc.d/ or /sbin/service is the ability to start and stop services.
Also, If you can execute the package manager of your distribution, you can install or remove software with it. If not, having rwx permission over a directory will let you do a local installation of software by compiling it there. This is a typical situation in many hosting companies’ services.
There are other ways for managing permissions, such as using PolicyKit, Extended ACLs or SELinux, which may be preventing or allowing your access. You should check them in that case.
At a database server level¶
To query the privileges that your database user has been granted, at a console of the server execute:
mysql> SHOW GRANTS;
or for a particular user with:
mysql> SHOW GRANTS FOR 'db-user'@'host';
It will display the privileges using the same format as for the SHOW-GRANT statement.
Note that privileges may vary across versions of the server. To list the exact list of privileges that your server support (and a brief description of them) execute:
mysql> SHOW PRIVILEGES;