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File access permissions on UNIX-like systems such as Linux

About access permissions for UNIX-like systems such as Linux

This article is machine-translated, may not be accurate
11/5/2025

I researched file access permissions on UNIX-like systems such as Linux and am leaving a note here. Please tell me if anything is incorrect.

ls -lをMacOSでやると、こういうのが出てくる。

 ls -al
total 1632
drwxr-xr-x@ 206 my-name  staff   6592 Nov  5 16:17 .
drwx------@ 785 my-name  staff  25120 Nov  5 15:50 ..
-rw-r--r--@   1 my-name  staff  12292 Nov  5 16:18 .DS_Store
drwxr-xr-x@  80 my-name  staff   2560 Nov  5 16:16 001-039
-rw-rw-r--@   1 my-name  staff     32 Nov  5 16:00 001.csv
-rw-rw-r--@   1 my-name  staff     14 May 11  2022 001.txt
...

It’s a command to list files, but what’s that -rw-rw-r--@ on the left?

Permission notation on UNIX-like systems

According to what I found, UNIX-like OSes express permissions in this way. The leading - and the following three groups represent permissions for user, group, and others.

Breaking down -rw-rw-r--@ gives - | rw- | rw- | r-- | @.

  • The first character is either - or d; d indicates the entry is a directory.
  • The subsequent groups of three characters indicate permissions (described below).
    • The three-character group repeats three times. The first is the owning user, the next is the owning group, and the last is other users.
    • In the example -rw-rw-r--@ 1 my-name staff 14 May 11 2022 001.txt, my-name is the owner, and staff is the owning group.
    • If it’s rwxrwxrwx, everything is permitted.
  • The trailing @ indicates extended attributes are present on certain OSes like macOS. (On some OSes it might be +?)
    • The rwxrwxrwx settings alone aren’t always sufficient, so macOS adds extra information.

Explanation of permission types

Their meanings are as follows:

CharacterMeaning
-Not allowed
rRead - read permission
wWrite - write permission
xeXecute - execute permission

If read and write are allowed but execute is not, it would look like rw-.

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