[TUHS] Early UNIX file permission oddity

Wilko Bulte wb at freebie.xs4all.nl
Wed May 21 16:15:15 AEST 2008


Quoting Warren Toomey, who wrote on Wed, May 21, 2008 at 02:32:24PM +1000 ..
> I was just browsing through the 1974 UNIX CACM paper, the one that first
> publicly described the design and functionality of UNIX. I came across
> some sentences which describe the file permissions, and they sounded quite odd:
> 
>   When a file is created, it is marked with the user ID of its owner.
>   Also given for new files is a set of seven protection bits.
>   Six of these specify independently read, write, and execute permission
>   for the owner of the file and for all other users. [The seventh bit
>   is the set-user-id bit. ]
> 
> This seems to indicate that there are "rwx" bits for owner, "rwx" bits for other,
> and no "rwx" bits for group. I've never seen a UNIX system with 6 file
> permission bits, so I thought I would poke around to see what I could find. It

Well, I have a UNIX-like system sitting in my basement that has this.  This
is a TSC Uniflex system running on a Motorola MC6809 CPU.  8 bit CPU in
other words.

..

Wilko



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