permission information is an association of three values to a file

value-uid, value-gid, value-other -> file

a file can have one user (uid) and one group (gid) related permission.

in regard to the quantity of users the permissions can correspond to

one-user, some-users, all-users

the individual values are themselves composed of three other values

(read write execute)

example

value-uid:one-user:(read:yes write:yes execute:no)
value-group:some-users:(read:yes write:yes execute:no)
value-other:all-users:(read:yes write:no execute:no)

when a file is created, the permissions are set by the creating program and modified by the kernel for individual processes using "umasks".

(path (uid/gid/other/default value) ...)

instead of being limited to permissions only for three types to a file, it is possible to assign permission values for an arbitrary number of entities, which can be users, groups as well as default permissions. the maximum permissions are always limited by the still active three-value permissions, which means access control lists layer on top of the three-value permission system. this system is activated at filesystem mount with a mount option

the retrieval of the effective permissions to a file for a process from the user perspective can be seen as a function with the following signature

path current-process-uid current-process-gid -> file-permissions-for-process

directories are files that contain entries which associate file-names to file inodes. to read from a directory means to read only the file names of entries. access needs translation from file names to file inodes. access is controlled via the execute permission. because of this, the "execute" permission could be called "access" permission for directories

one may create and execute a script that sets up the file-permissions, maybe called regularly. without such a script, unwanted changes to permissions could stay undiscovered and be a security risk and make other problems or would have to be manually resetted when discovered

can display permissions of files in directories (the current directory if unspecified). example: ls -l

"change mode" - changes permissions of files. example: chmod 600 /tmp

"change owner" - changes owner and group of files.

• example: chown username:groupname /tmp
• example: chown -h username: /tmp sets to username:username. useful if group equals user name

for security, only the root user can change the owner. on some systems like gnu/linux, symlinks have an owner and group. chown -h username:groupname mysymlink

displays access control list permissions, acl. example: getfacl *

sets acl permissions. example: setfacl -m u:username:rw path

filters and displays files in directory trees. can be used to set permissions selectively. example: find -type f |xargs -n 1 -d \n chmod 600

sets the current process' umask, sub-processes usually inherit it. it is specified as a subtraction from full permission (777). example: umask 133