A quick q: how to view chmod stuff?
 

Sure I can chmod xxx to give a file or folder attributes, but what about doing it in reverse - just viewing the attributes?

ls -l ( that's a lower case L )

This will give you something along the lines of:

-rwxr-xr-x

Which is read/write/execute. They correspond to the values 4/2/1. So, in order to make the above come true, you'd issue the command chmod 755.

beautiful, thanks!