Ok heres the situation
I've been studying Solaris 8 for about 6 months now and some things click in my head but others don't.
One of the things that don't click are file permissions.
For example I login at work and I use the ls -l command to get a long listing of the files w/ the permissions.

What does -r-xr-xr-x mean???
I understand a little about world, group and user but I need it explained in laymens terms

Please help, any info you could spare would be much appreciated

I'm not sure if this document would help you:

http://www.perlfect.com/articles/chmod.shtml

In simple terms, a file (note that a directory is also a file) has both a user and group associated with it. When you "ls -l", you ought to see the username and groupname (or user id and group id on some systems). The 3 user bits apply to the user specified by this user id, the 3 group bits apply to anyone in the group specified, and for the others, the last 3 bits apply.

lrwxrwxrwx

l -> link to other files, besides l, it could be others..letters

r-> read
w-> write
x -> executable
three of them makes a set

after l, the first set, rwx is for the owner permission
the second set is for the group. to find out whcih group u are in, do a more /etc/passwd | grep yourusename
the third set is for others. which mean other users.

rwx in binary form is 2 to the power of 0, 1, 2 and that gives the below
r == 1
w == 2
x == 4


to change mode, chmod 777, chmod +xrw
to change owner, chown newowner:newgroup file
to change group, chgrp (hmm, CANT REMEMBER NOW)