setting security bits on UNIX

[Joseph C. Lininger]

Ned,
Wehn calculating the number you should pass to chmod, the following information is useful. read
is worth 4, write is worth 2, and execute is worth 1. Adding these gives you a single octal
number which represents the permition. Three of these numbers are used to represent user,
group, and world permitions. Thus rwxr-xr-x would be 755.

The umask command represents the permitions to remove from newly created files. You start with
666 for files and 777 for directories. Most systems use a umask of 022, which results in 644
for files and 755 for directories.

Equal causes can produce very unequal effects.
Joseph C. Lininger
jbahm at pcdesk.net
Verification: 5eab38a77ac40416e075be8f50607ff7

And so it came to pass that on Mon, 25 Apr 2005, Ned said

> Hi all,
>
> I don't know how to take off protection from one of my files
> Tried umask 022, umask 0, etc, nothing works. The chmod command didn't work either. I don't
know the values that I need to put in.
> The ls -l fileName command should give me:
> -rwxr-xr-x
> but not all dashes as it does now.
> It's an html file that needs to be read and executed by anybody.
> Please help.
>
> Many thanks in advance!
> Ned
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