The owner of the process must have discretionary search (execute) access to all directories in the path preceding the final object. Once the final object is reached, access operations can be performed as follows.
Read from a file or list the contents of a directory - Discretionary read access is allowed when a process has discretionary search (execute) access to all directories in the object's path and discretionary read access to the object.
Write to a file, create a file or directory, or delete a file or directory - Discretionary write access is allowed when the process has discretionary search (execute) access to all directories in the object's path and discretionary write access to the object.
Execute a file - Discretionary execute access is allowed when the process has discretionary search (execute) access to all directories in the file's path and discretionary execute access to the file.