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On Sun, 13 Dec 2015, Neil Winchurst wrote:
Thanks for all that help.I am asking the wrong question it seems. I am not wanting the file to be encrypted at all. What I am looking for is a way to add a password to any file (leaving the file itself unchanged) so that I need to enter that password in order to access that file. As I said, when I click on the file a small window comes up asking for the password. Type that in and I can access the file. If I cannot provide the password the file won't open. I envisage the password check to happen first, then and only then, if I have provided the correct password, will the program look at the extension to decide which program to use to run it. I was also hoping to add a password as above to any folder. My accounts folder would be a good example. Rather than set up a password for each file, just one for the folder. Yes, I do know that individual files in LibreOffice can be encrypted. I have also used Truecrypt. It seems a different approach is needed,
Easier to just re-write the OS, as essentially what you want isn't supported by Linux, nor any other *nix type OS, really. There are ACLs (access control lists), but these are just a superset of the existing protections and don't have any sort of password control. (and they're a bugger to admin too)
And nothing you impose at the user or even OS level will stop someone removing the disk and opening it in another PC that doesn't have the "protection" you're after. So back to the question of: What do you actually want to achieve? In a traditional *nix multi-user enviroment, you have 3 levels of file/directory protection - owner, group and everyone. At each level you can speficy read, write or execute (which for directories means 'search' or the abiltiy to run the 'ls' command) This has worked well for decades in small, medium and large (e.g. university) environments to allow people to have private files, share them in a group, or share with everyone. But at the end of the day, without whole disk (or partition) encryption, anyone with physcial access has access to all the data anyway. I think you're making life hard for yourself. If you have data you don't want people to see then keep it on a portable USB connected encrypted storage device and unplug it and take it with you all the time. Or calculate the value of your data vs. the time and energy you're spending to "protect" it. Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq