PermCheck

Our shared software directories are required to adhere to a specific pattern of permissions and group ownership. They should, under normal conditions, have group ownership of "sec-bioinf-softwareadmins", and have permissions set group-writeable but read-only to user and world. The intent is that the directories will be protected from accidental change, requiring a deliberate change to group sec-bioinf-softwareadmins before adding/changing these paths.

This package is slightly more general, allowing the user to specify a umask and group on the command line, as well as a list of email addresses to send notifications to if there are incorrect permissions, and a list of paths to check.

The package will then traverse those directories, checking file permissions and group ownership. If incorrect permissions are found, the package will send a notification to the supplied addresses. If no email addresses are supplied, the notification(s) will be written to standard output.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'permCheck'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install permCheck

Usage

Run the package as

permCheck [options] path ...

where the options are:

• -u/--umask -- permission bits which must not be set, as 9 characters: rwxrwxrwx, where the bits which must not be set are those letters, and others are dashes, e.g. ----w--w- indicates that the relevant files must not be group- or world-writeable.
• -s/--smask -- permission bits which must be set, with syntax as above.
• -g/--group -- group that files must be owned by.
• -m/--mailto -- comma-separated list of email addresses to send results to; if omitted, results are written to stdout.
• -v/--version -- displays version of the program and exits.
• -h/--help -- displays program usage.

and the path(s) is(are) the paths to check for violations.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/crukci-bioinformatics/permCheck.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.