There was a problem loading the comments.

File Permissions

Support Portal  »  Knowledgebase  »  Viewing Article

  Print
Many time a script's installation instructions or readme file will tell you that you need to change permissions on or chmod a file/directory so that the script can execute or write to the file/directory. You'll need to make these changes through the file manager or through ftp.

Usually programs will display permission in an odd way such as this:
_rwxrwxrwx

In number form that's 777. You may or may not have the _ at the beginning. If you do, that means it's a file that has those permissions. If it's a directory you'll see a d there (drwxrwxrwx) instead of the underscore.

Each group of 3 characters are the permissions for the user, the group and finally others (everyone else). In addition, each group of 3 characters make up one number. The following is what each letter stands for:

r (read) = 4
w (write) = 2
x (execute) = 1

To give some examples of some common permission converted from the letters to numbers (with the first character removed to avoid some confusion):

rwxrwxrwx -> 777
rwx_r_xr_x -> 755
rw_rw_rw_ -> 666
rw_r__r__ -> 644

As you see above, you just add up what each letter is equal to in each group to form the numbers.

Share via
Did you find this article useful?  

Related Articles


Comments

Add Comment

Replying to  

CAPTCHA
© Livingdot