In life, each of us has had to get or give permission to do something. On TFN, each user has the ability to give and revoke permissions. You can grant permissions on files and directories. On a unix or linux system like TFN, there are 3 different groups that you can set permissions for. The User, (u) The Group (g) and Other (o) (otherwise known as "The World") Everyone who is a user on TFN owns files and directories. Every user of TFN is by default a member of the group 'users' Groups can also have permissions to read, write or execute files as well as directories, and the same can be said about "The World."

The way you set up or remove permissions is as simple as adding or subtracting that permission - To do this, you use the "chmod" command.

For Example a Permission of '700' means: User gets Read, Write and Execute Permissions, the Zeros mean Group Gets No Permissions, Other Gets No permissions. hence chmod 700.

Me, I don't normally use the numerical permissions - Learned that one day when I made a math mistake that locked up my home directory! Now, if I want to give permissions I use the Chmod command and I give it like this:
chmod u+rx "file" which means I have given read and execute permissions to the user (owner) of the file. I can also do it in a couple of steps, which makes it easier to see what the heck it is that I am doing. To do this in steps, you would set the permissions by issuing the chmod command with the proper group - as many as 3 times. You can alsogive g+/- or o+/- to grant or remove permissions for the Group or other (the world)

HTML directories should be set so that they are world readable at the onset - I was taught that you should set directory permissions so that your home directory is open (755) and that once you do that, you can then set your public_html directory open (755) and set other permissions as necessary. A Good Friend once taught me that if you set permissions of other directories and files the way you want them to be on an individual basis, your main directory can remain 755, as well as your public_html directory 755.

If you are not quite sure what you are doing using chmod via octals, you should do it using the u g and o and either add (+) or remove (-) permissions r w x for files and directories.

For further information on File Permissions, you can visit The Basics of File Permissions

If you have any questions or concerns about file permissions, Mail The Questions Team