g.access(1grass)

💅 g.access — the GRASS mapset bouncer 💅

okay bestie, so this is g.access, a page from the GRASS User's Manual (that's the manual name, iykyk). She's the one who decides who gets to peek at your current mapset and who gets politely told no. If you don't give her any option at all, she just prints the current status. Iconic behaviour, honestly.

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✨ KEYWORDS ✨

general, map management, permission

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🫶 SYNOPSIS 🫶

g.access
g.access --help
g.access  [group=string]   [other=string]   [--help]  [--verbose]  [--quiet]  [--ui]

🎀 Flags 🎀

• --help — prints the usage summary, the lil "here's how you use me" moment
• --verbose — verbose module output, she overshares (affectionately)
• --quiet — quiet module output, she says nothing, main character silence
• --ui — forces the GUI dialog to launch, for the girlies who love a window

🌸 Parameters 🌸

• group=string — access for group. Options: grant, revoke
• other=string — access for others. Options: grant, revoke

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

So basically this program lets you control access to the current mapset. Normally literally any user can read data from any GRASS mapset, which is giving open house. But sometimes you want to prohibit access to certain sensitive data — and that's where our girl comes in. The g.access command lets a user restrict read and execute access to the current mapset (like, see the UNIX chmod command for the vibes). Important: g.access will not modify write access to the current mapset. She does not touch that. Not her job. Periodt.

The user may, for example, allow only users in the same UNIX group to read data files in the mapset, or restrict the mapset to personal use only. Your mapset, your rules, no cap.

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🦋 NOTES 🦋

Under GRASS, access to the mapset PERMANENT must be open to all users. Why? Because GRASS looks for the user's default geographic region definition settings and the project TITLE in files that are stored under the PERMANENT mapset directory. So the g.access command will not allow you to restrict access to the PERMANENT mapset. Don't even try, bestie, she said no. 💀

The g.mapsets command isn't smart enough to tell if access to a specified mapset is restricted, so the user is therefore allowed to include the names of restricted mapsets in his search path. But — and this is the important part — the data in a restricted mapset is still protected. Any attempts to look for or use data in a restricted mapset will fail. The user will simply not see any data listed for a restricted mapset. Nothing to see here, moving on. 🙈

⚠️ UNIX filesystem access controls and g.access actions are not supported by MS-Windows. Just so you know. Fr fr.

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• UNIX manual entries for chmod(1) and group(5)
• g.mapsets

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Michael Shapiro, U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory

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⭐ SOURCE CODE ⭐

Available at: g.access source code (history)

Latest change: Monday Jun 23 19:12:04 2025 in commit: d81912adf765c7e86d579395eefe75182f08c185

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© 2003-2026 GRASS Development Team, GRASS 8.5.0 Reference Manual

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and that's the whole page, bestie 🫶 this was GRASS 8.5.0, and she ate, no crumbs. go forth and guard your mapset 💅✨