So far, so good. Permission denied As we expected, we could cd into the directory, but we couldn't copy, move, or remove the file within that directory, even though we were teased a bit during the remove operation. However, I wasn't able to move that same file into my home directory. This strange behavior makes sense if you understand what actually happens when you move and copy files. Remember that everything is a file to Unix.
Regular files contain data, such as text.
A directory is really just a file which contains a list of the other files that live within the directory. In order to move a file, you have to remove the file from this list. If you don't have write permission to the directory, you can't change the list, so you won't be able to move the file. In order to copy a file, you have to add the name of the new file to the list of the directory you want to copy the file to. However, when we tried to copy .cshrc to our home directory, we had write permission to our home directory, so the copy was successful.