Lesson 6 File Permissions

This week we take a look at the file permissions or “mode” of a file, (or directory). The permissions can be set for the user owner, the group owner and others. The available permissions are just read, write and execute. Execute permissions to a directory mean that you can enter the directory, or more specifically traverse the directory link, enter works perfectly well for me 🙂

We use chmod to set the permissions and ls -l to display permissions, ls -ld is needed to display the permissions for a directory. When using chmod there are two methods of setting permissions, with decimal or character notation:

• chmod 755 file1
• chmod u=rwx,g=rx,o=rx file

The umask value can be used to alter the default permissions of files and directories.