Remember the dilemma we posed to begin this month's article. But now you know that ACDs allow you to do these things from the proprietary side of the fence. George Stachnik, the director of Hewlett-Packard's Technology Closeup series of television broadcasts, holds the title of Chief of Customer Communications. He works at Hewlett-Packard's campus in Cupertino, California. Representing Permissions in Octal On UNIX systems, the file permissions are stored internally as a string of nine bits.
Octal numbers are a convenient shorthand for groups of three bits.
An octal number is a digit from one to seven. If any combination of three bits can be represented using a single octal digit, then the nine bits that make up the file permissions can be represented using three octal digits. The first octal digit represents the three owner permissions, the second octal digit represents the permissions that apply to users with the same GID as the file, and the third represents the permissions that apply to everybody else. Copyright 2001 Interex. All rights reserved.