Is it possible to change the permissions for the symbolic link?

I am trying to change the permissions for the symbolic link.

As how you can see in the image, the soft link has 777 permissions, but i would like to change that.

I tried to change that by:

1. chmod 755 someLink - but this changes linked directory (someDir) permission.
2. chmod -h 755 someLink - this brings eroor chmod: invalid option --'h'

Is there a way how to change symbolic link permissions? I am on Ubuntu 18.04

Many thanks in advance

1 Answer

While not an exact duplicate, this answer should provide a hint:

$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 vidarlo users 0 May 21 19:10 a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 vidarlo users 1 May 21 19:10 b -> a
$ chmod 755 b
$ ls -la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 vidarlo users 0 May 21 19:10 a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 vidarlo users 1 May 21 19:10 b -> a

In short: symlinks does not have permissions. Anyone can read where the symlink points to. The permissions of the target determines the access.

As Rinzwind points out, the -h flag is for *BSD versions of chmod. It does not work on GNU versions of chmod.