Shell Programming and Scripting

You can collect them into a single string instead of printing one line for each.

Code:

perms=`ls -l "$1" | cut -f1`
perms=${perms#?}
for role in user group other; do
  what=none
  case $perms in
    r??*) what=read;;
  esac
  case $perms in
    ?w?*) what="$what"${what:+", "}"write";;
  esac
  case $perms in
    ??x*) what="$what"${what:+", "}"execute";;
  esac
  echo "$what for $role"
  perms=${perms#???}
done

The construct ${variable:+something} means "if variable is empty, substitute nothing; otherwise, substitute 'something'". Your shell might be picky about how much quoting it tolerates in this construct; play around with different quoting if you can't get this to work directly (or simply give up on having commas between the values, as a crude workaround).