Show Me Mac® OS X, v10.3 Panther™

Changing Permissions for a File or Directory

A file's permissions are what allow it to open when you double-click applications to use and folders to open. They're the little security guards that instruct the file what it can and can't do. In general, the files that you create aren't accessible to other users. However, UNIX allows you to explicitly make your files available to others. Each file in UNIX has an owner—normally the user who creates the file. The file also belongs to a particular group. A group in UNIX is a set of users. Type the command groups to see what groups you are a member of. Each user can have read, write, or execute permissions to the file (r, w, or x). These permissions are set and modified by the owner of the file. Read ...