Comments on: Why don’t Unix users use symbolic permissions anymore?

By: do_not_lick

do_not_lick — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 05:24:40 +0000

Sure — the root password is “p4ssw0rd”.

By: ptomblin_lj

ptomblin_lj — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 05:08:11 +0000

I’ve been doing Unix professionally since 1987, and I still don’t know the numbers off hand. So unless I’m copying some install instruction that says “chmod 0644 foo.sh”, I’ll do a “chmod a+x foo.sh” or “chmod go-w myfile”. Hell, I don’t even remember that there is an “=” option or you can combine things (although I do remember +s and +t) so sometimes I’ll end up doing several chmods on one file to get it the way I want.

By: ptomblin_lj

ptomblin_lj — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 05:05:19 +0000

Can I have an account on your system?

By: damned_colonial

damned_colonial — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 01:44:13 +0000

For me, it often depends on what I’m changing the permissions on.

Example: the other day I was burning a bunch of crap to CD off my mac, and Finder was complaining about “special permissions” which were probably setuid or whatever, and whatever they were, I didn’t need to keep them in the backup I was making. So I did chmod -R a-s stuff-to-backup/ and it got rid of them. There’d be no way to do that numerically without knowing exactly which files were relevant. Same thing if I know that some, but not all, permissions are screwed up in a directory of web stuff, where there are both subdirs and files: go+r will fix it, but 644 would screw the directories.

That said, I’ll use 644 or 755 or whatever if it’s a simple case, and the simple cases account for more than 90% of my chmod use.

By: frobisher

frobisher — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:39:55 +0000

I don’t spend so much time setting sticky bits and such, so I wind up looking those up and wind up coming up with numbers. Plain old permissions stuff, I can just remember the symbolic ones.

So, I guess I’m you backwards. :-)

By: substitute

substitute — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:22:31 +0000

answer: pure dumb habit, in my case

By: opal1159

opal1159 — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:16:14 +0000

I only ever do chmod in WS_FTP, which has checkboxes. I associate numbers with what I have to do to certain files because script instructions say so. :P

By: deviant_

deviant_ — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 23:58:39 +0000

I think it’s actually more complicated behavior than you’re giving it credit for. For instance, the vast majority of the time when you want to set permissions, you’re setting something to 0755 or 0644. So people tend to type those, because they’ve seen them a million times, and it seems like the shortest path from A to B. At the same time, you don’t have to figure out what the current permissions are, and you don’t have to type a lot. But if you just want to, say, remove 01, then it’s generally much easier to do “o-x” than to think about which bit is which.

By: asciident

asciident — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 22:47:05 +0000

I can never remember the symbolic ones. I’ve assigned what the numbers do to “real words” in my head, and use the numbers.

By: flipzagging

flipzagging — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 21:08:30 +0000

I typically use numbers for individual files, because there are really only a few that you need to know – 644, 775, etc.

I use letters for setuid, setgid, and sticky because I do that stuff so rarely I don’t remember the numbers.

For recursive find, it would depend on what I was doing.