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I am setting up a samba share and two shares that are identical one is accessible and one is not. Wile looking into what might solve the problem I saw this command. I can not find what it does though.

What does "chcon -t samba_share_t /path/to/share" do?

To elaborate on this question why would I ever need to run this command on one share but not the other. Both shares were created the same, same user and same computer.

Starblight
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2 Answers2

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It changes the SELinux context of the specified path to samba_share_t. This would be necessary if you have SELinux in enforcing mode on your system and the path being referred to was not previously designated as a Samba share (via SELinux labeling).

John
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John's answer gives an excellent explanation of the second part of your question. To add to John's answer, the command broken down looks like this:

  • chcon - Changes security context for files. You can read more about chcon here.
  • -t samba_share_t - The -t is used to designate the target security context's type, which in this case, is samba_share_t.
  • /path/to/share/ is the file targeted for the chcon operation.
aliceinpalth
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  • I ran this on one of my shares and it granted access to the share folder but not sub folders is there a way to apply it to all sub folders? – Starblight Jan 31 '18 at 20:35
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    You can use the -R or --recursive parameter to operate on all files and sub-folders. – aliceinpalth Jan 31 '18 at 20:37