What is meaning of this code: chomd +x mydate

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2004 at 06:15:17AM -0500, Brian Fahrlander wrote:
>    I didn't realize that no "a" intimates an "a".  I've been using
> "chmod a+x myfile" since the late 80's. Good to know.

It's not exactly the same -- without the "a", it's as if the "a" were given
but the bits set in the umask are not touched:

$ umask
0002
$ touch somefile
$ chmod 0 somefile
$ ls -l somefile
----------  1 mattdm mattdm 0 Oct 13 09:35 somefile
$ chmod +rw somefile
$ ls -l somefile
-rw-rw-r--  1 mattdm mattdm 0 Oct 13 09:35 somefile
$ chmod a+rw somefile
$ ls -l somefile
-rw-rw-rw-  1 mattdm mattdm 0 Oct 13 09:35 somefile


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>