How to restrict users in linux to their home directory

So lets say you have a server with a bunch of users and they all have sites and data and you don’t want them to be able to see each others data. A lot of distributions aren’t setup to stop users from wandering and reading files within other users directories.

What you will need to do is change the permissions on the /home and each users directory using chmod. So first we need to change the permission on “/home”


[root@taco:/]# chmod 0751 /home
[root@taco:/]# stat home
File: `home'
Size: 4096 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 4096 directory
Device: 900h/2304d Inode: 2 Links: 32
Access: (0751/drwxr-x--x) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root)
Access: 2007-12-03 13:58:07.000000000 -0800
Modify: 2007-11-21 12:10:17.000000000 -0800
Change: 2007-12-03 13:57:28.000000000 -0800


As you can see the folder is now set to 0751, depending you may want to change this but by default this should be fine.

Now you need to change the permission on each users directory using chmod yet again


[root@taco:/]# chmod 0751 jordan
[root@taco:/home]# stat jordan
File: `jordan'
Size: 4096 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 4096 directory
Device: 900h/2304d Inode: 19709953 Links: 15
Access: (0751/drwxr-x--x) Uid: ( 1000/ jordan) Gid: ( 1000/ jordan)
Access: 2007-12-03 12:14:23.000000000 -0800
Modify: 2007-11-14 11:06:38.000000000 -0800
Change: 2007-12-03 13:57:42.000000000 -0800


Now your users shouldn’t be able to see other users on your system!