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Learning Perl, 5th Edition
book

Learning Perl, 5th Edition

by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, brian d foy
June 2008
Beginner content levelBeginner
352 pages
11h 16m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Learning Perl, 5th Edition

Modifying Permissions

The Unix chmod command changes the permissions on a file or directory. Similarly, Perl has the chmod function to perform this task:

chmod 0755, "fred", "barney";

As with many of the operating system interface functions, chmod returns the number of items successfully altered, and when used with a single argument, sets $! in a sensible way for error messages when it fails. The first parameter is the Unix permission value (even for non-Unix versions of Perl). For the same reasons we presented earlier when describing mkdir, this value is usually specified in octal.

Symbolic permissions (like +x or go=u-w) accepted by the Unix chmod command are not valid for the chmod function.[*]

[*] Unless you’ve installed and invoked the File::chmod module from CPAN, which can apparently upgrade the chmod operator to understand symbolic mode values.

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596520106Supplemental ContentErrata Page