In last month's issue, I talked about Linux permissions (see "It's Better to Ask Forgiveness..." in the May 2015 UpFront section). I could have covered SUID, GUID and sticky bit in the same article, ...

One way to get a little more clarity on this is to look at the permissions with the stat command. The fourth line of stat’s output displays the file permissions both in octal and string format: $ stat ...