This is the directory that has most of your configuration files. Most importantly, your passwd and group files live here. From root, you can do anything and everything. Anyone who has root access has the power to create and destroy. This password needs to be guarded very, very closely.
Basic permissions deal with the last nine characters.
The most common permissions are read r , write w and execute x . For this file, the user has read and write privileges, but not execute. The next three refer to the group privileges. This file belongs to the group users , but they only have read access. The world also has read privileges.