Properties and permissions

The Properties dialog shows details of the selected files and lets you change their Unix permissions, owner and group. Open it with Files › Properties or F9. With several files selected, changes apply to all of them.

What the dialog shows

The Common tab lists the file name, Location, Size, and for links the target (Links to). For a directory the size is not known until you click Calculate, which walks the directory and adds up its contents.

Change permissions

Permissions appear as a grid of check boxes: read, write and execute for Owner, Group and Others, plus Set UID, Set GID and Sticky bit.

1. Tick or untick the boxes, or type a value in Octal, for example 644 for a web page or 755 for a script.
2. To apply the change to everything inside the selected directories, tick Set owner, group and permissions recursively.
3. Click OK.

When you edit several files whose permissions differ, a box can be in a third, mixed state, which means “leave as it is”. Right-click the grid for shortcuts: No Rights, Default Rights, All Rights, Leave as Is, and copying or pasting the value as text or octal.

Add X to directories gives directories the execute bit wherever they have read permission. A directory without the execute bit cannot be entered, even when it is readable.

Note

Which properties you can change depends on the protocol. SFTP and SCP support permissions, owner and group. Most FTP servers accept permission changes only. WebDAV and S3 have no Unix permissions. For a single S3 object the dialog has a Tags tab, where you can add, edit and remove its tags.

Change owner and group

Pick or type a new Owner and Group. The server decides who may do this; on most systems only root can give a file away to another user.

Calculate a checksum

The Checksum tab computes a hash of the selected files on the server, so you can compare them with a local copy without downloading them.

1. Choose an Algorithm. The list shows what the server offers.
2. Click Calculate checksum.

This needs server support: an SFTP server with the check-file extension, or an FTP server with a hash command. Otherwise the tab is not offered.

Set permissions when uploading

To give uploaded files fixed permissions, use Set permissions in the upload options of the transfer settings instead of fixing them afterwards.

Sizes in the panel

The size column shows files only. To see directory sizes in the panel itself, select the directories and use Files › Calculate Directory Sizes. To choose bytes, kilobytes or a short format, right-click a column header and use Show File Sizes In.