[MacPerl] For Kathy Brook's eyes [was: MacPerl Works!!!!]

[Yuan-Yuan Sun <yyuansun@access.ch>]

Hi Kathy, do something about your email address!! My mail bounced.
So I'm posting it - but it doesn't belong on the list...

Sorry, others.
----
>I used the MacPerl application and it kept saying permission denied. So I
>tried using a text editor.  After all the comments that this was not a
>MacPerl question, I went back to MacPerl.  At the command line I typed
>chmod 777 and it worked!!!
>
>Can someone explain why this worked?.  I know I should be grateful that it
>worked, but I need to understand why.

Hi Kathy

It's still a Unix thing and not a MacPerl thing. (That's why I can answer
it. I'm very much a newbie at MacPerl.)

How much do you know about Unix? Do you know that each and every file and
folder is "owned" by someone, usually the person who created the file; this
person belonging to a group (e.g. students); all the other members of that
same group have certain privileges; and then there's the rest of the world,
also with certain privileges. These privileges pertain to the right to
read, write and execute a certain file, and are set for each of the three
categories. (That's why you have three numbers.)

Now, when you typed chmod 777, you changed the permissions of your file to
"the owner, the group, and everyone have read, write and execute
permissions". That's what the 7 means. Now, if you'd typed chmod 770, that
would've meant "owner and group get read, write and execute permissions,
anyone else gets nothing at all".

The numbers mean (you can add single permissions to get the combined
permissions)

0 no permissions
1 execute only
2 write only
3 write and execute
4 read only
5 read and execute
6 read and write
7 read, write, execute

Now, if you want to know more and are not very confident or computer
literate, try e.g. "Unix for Dummies". It explains the basics in a very
understandable way.

Yuan-Yuan Sun

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Gruss, Yuan-Yuan



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