Overview

There are three components that are in the picture when it comes to managing the permissions of a file. 

• User – Abbreviated by ‘u’

• Group – Abbreviated by ‘g’

• Other– Abbreviated by ‘o’

• Permissions (Read/Write/Execute) where read, write, execute is abbreviated by ‘r’,’w’ and ‘x’

So o+w means giving write permission to the other user

Example

• Create a file temp.txt. Check its permissions

ls -all | grep temp.txt
-rw-r--r--    1 root  root      0 Aug  9 14:50 temp.txt

Notice that the other user only has permission to only read

• Now run command

chmod o+w temp.txt
ls -all | grep temp.txt
-rw-r--rw-    1 root  root      0 Aug  9 14:50 temp.txt

See output above. Execute permission is also given to the other user.