Example—Changing Permissions in Absolute Mode

In the following example, the permissions of a public directory are changed from 744 (read, write, execute; read-only; and read-only) to 755 (read, write, execute; read and execute; and read and execute).

$ ls -ld public_dir
drwxr--r--  1 ignatz   staff    6023 Aug  5 12:06 public_dir
$ chmod 755 public_dir
$ ls -ld public_dir
drwxr-xr-x  1 ignatz   staff    6023 Aug  5 12:06 public_dir

In the following example, the permissions of an executable shell script are changed from read and write to read, write, and execute.

$ ls -l my_script
-rw------- 1 ignatz   staff    6023 Aug  5 12:06 my_script
$ chmod 700 my_script
$ ls -l my_script
-rwx------ 1 ignatz   staff    6023 Aug  5 12:06 my_script