password protect a file

[krool89]

Is it possible to password protect a file in c language..?? it is not encyrpt data

By this I mean that when anybody is going to view the file (whatever be the way he choose) it will ask for a password and if valid password is entered it will allow.
If any body found any hints or any suitable link just help me.

[schragge]

This has nothing to do with C per se. Make the file owned by specific user or group, restrict read permissions on it to that user/group, protect the user/group with a password, then use su/sg to access the file. I'd recommend making the file owned by root, creating an appropriate group, and using sg or newgrp for this.

See manpages for addgroup (http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/quantal/en/man8/addgroup.8.html), gpasswd (http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/quantal/en/man1/gpasswd.1.html), chown (http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/quantal/en/man1/chown.1.html), chgrp (http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/quantal/en/man1/chgrp.1.html), chmod (http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/quantal/en/man1/chmod.1.html), sg (http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/quantal/en/man1/sg.1.html), newgrp (http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/quantal/en/man1/newgrp.1.html).

[nvteighen]

schragge's solution is a good one, but system-dependent and it doesn't really give you password-protection as you might know it from, e.g. OpenOffice.

If you want to write a program that password protects some file, then you do want encryption: your password will be the key needed to decrypt the file into some human-readable format. The GNU crypt library supports DES encryption and there are other libraries that might be useful to you. If you want to encrypt a whole directory hierarchy, there's EncFS (although I'm not sure if there's a library for it... of not, call it from shell).

[wolfgentleman]

If the file is not an executable, what you want is not possible - at least not OS independent. You would have to encrypt it. If you do decide to encrypt, my suggestion is PGP keys.