Symbolic Mode

Symbolic Mode

In the Absolute mode, you change permissions for all 3 owners. In the symbolic mode, you can modify permissions of a specific owner. It makes use of mathematical symbols to modify the file permissions.
The table below gives the file permission operators :

Operator	Description
+	Adds a permission to a file or directory
-	Removes the permission
=	Sets the permission and overrides the permissions set earlier

The various owners are represented as :

User	Denotations
U	user/owner
G	Group
O	Other
A	All

Here's an example using generalnote. Running ls -l on the generalnote shows that the file's permissions are as follows −

Then each example chmod command from the preceding table is run on the testfile, followed by ls –l, so you can see the permission changes −