Read Permissions

Read permissions allow the user to view the contents of the file. If you have read permissions, but you do not have execute permissions you can copy the file into another directory and change the permissions of the file. You can also change the permissions of the file if you have permissions for that directory. You can give everyone read access to the file by typing:

bash$ chmod a+r text1.txt

You can give permissions to only the user, group, or others by using u, g, and o instead of a. This is what you would do to give read permissions to the group:

bash$ chmod g+r text1.txt

If you wanted to take away everyones read permissions you would replace the plus sign with a minus sign:

bash$ chmod a-r text1.txt

You can also set the file by typing the binary values of each bit. We will talk about that later in this section.