Permissions are an important part of security, and also play a major role in the proper serving and processing of your CGI scripts and other programs. Sometimes a 3rd-party program may tell you to CHMOD the permissions to a numerical value. Our File Manager lets you assign permissions quickly and easily, but uses a letter system. If you need to know the letter-code equivalent of a numerical permission setting, see the chart below.

The values for the numbers used in the "CHMOD" command are as follows:

Each number represents a block of letters in the File Manager screen permissions area. The first number or block of letters is for the domain owner (you), the second for the domain group (seldom used) and the third is for everyone else. For example, for a permission setting that looks like this:

rwx r-x r-x

The numerical value is 755. How did we come up with that? Let's break it down.

The first number is 7, that's Read, Write and Execute according to our chart. Looking at our permissions screen, we need only check the 'r', 'w', and 'x' boxes in the first block (owner). The second and third numbers are both 5. The chart says that 5 equals Read and Execute, but not write. So you would check the 'r' and 'x' boxes for the second and third blocks (group and others) and leave the 'w' box unchecked. That's it!

Some common examples:

755 = rwx r-x r-x
644 = rw- r-- r--
600 = rw- --- --- (common for email boxes)