Unless you’re a bit of a UNIX geek, you probably don’t run into permissions issues a lot. And those that you do encounter can usually be solved by going into the Disk Utility and running Repair Permissions. Done and done, right?
Well, if you’ve ever been curious about just what permissions are and how they work, boy do I ever have a Knowledge Base document for you. “Troubleshooting permissions issues in Mac OS X” is everything you’ve ever wanted to know about permissions, but were afraid to ask because it might make you look, well, weird. You’ll learn about how to translate permissions into numerical codes (quick—what does 542 mean?), default settings for files, and all about the glories that are root.
This is heady stuff, to be sure. And if that doesn’t get your fingers itching to dive into the Terminal, well, wait until I rundown the fsck article. Eh? Ehhh?
Permission 542 stands for:
-User "read and execute"
-Group "read"
-Other "write"
Cheat sheet for the non-geeky folks: 4 -> read, 2 -> write and 1 -> execute. Add the numbers up to get the magic numbers.
Fast enough?