A
Principal
representing an identity used to determine access rights to objects in a file system.
On many platforms and file systems an entity requires appropriate access rights or permissions in order to access objects in a file system. The access rights are generally performed by checking the identity of the entity. For example, on implementations that use Access Control Lists (ACLs) to enforce privilege separation then a file in the file system may have an associated ACL that determines the access rights of identities specified in the ACL.
A UserPrincipal
object is an abstract representation of an identity. It has a name
that is typically the username or account name that it represents. User principal objects may be obtained using a UserPrincipalLookupService
, or returned by FileAttributeView
implementations that provide access to identity related attributes. For example, the AclFileAttributeView
and PosixFileAttributeView
provide access to a file's owner
.