A user reports that they cannot write to a file named 'report.txt' which should be writable by members of the group 'staff'. As a sysadmin, you check the permissions with ls -l report.txt and the output shows -rw-r--r-- 1 root staff 1048576 Jan 01 12:34 report.txt. What is the most likely reason for the user being unable to write to the file?
The file is owned by the 'root' user, so only root can modify it
The group 'staff' does not exist on the system
The file only has write permissions for the owner
The file is too large to be written to by group members
The correct answer is The file only has write permissions for the owner. The permission string -rw-r--r-- indicates that the owner of the file (in this case, 'root') has read and write permissions, the group 'staff' members and others have only read permissions. Therefore, although the user is in the correct group, they won't be able to write to the file unless the write permission is added for the group.
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