I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
Permissions are the only real way most people will see bitmasks these days unless you're doing something particularly low-level.
Like file permissions:
rwxr-xr-x
reads literally as
1111101101 (i.e. 755)
Not realising this is exactly why everyone abuses chmod -R 777 so wildly.
It's also good1 for wrapping up complex permissions in a program:
I was supposed to include an example on complex conditions in the article, but then I thought that it was probably getting too long already. Thanks for bringing this up!
Also, may I ask what the xs stand for in rwxr-xr-x?
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
Permissions are the only real way most people will see bitmasks these days unless you're doing something particularly low-level.
Like file permissions:
reads literally as
Not realising this is exactly why everyone abuses
chmod -R 777
so wildly.It's also good1 for wrapping up complex permissions in a program:
vs.
Meh, "good". ↩
I was supposed to include an example on complex conditions in the article, but then I thought that it was probably getting too long already. Thanks for bringing this up!
Also, may I ask what the
x
s stand for inrwxr-xr-x
?They're the execute bits - if it's a file, you can run it as a command, if it's a directory, you can
cd
into it.