I think you are asking about permissions eg
drwxrwxrwx
which broken down means
d this is a dir file
rwx u - user/owner has read/write/execute
rwx g - group access is read/write execute
rwx o - others/world has read/write/execute
See the chmod cmd to alter permissions
eg
chmod u-x filename
means remove x (execute) perm for user (aka owner)
see here
http://rute.2038bug.com/node17.html.gz for more info, in fact that on-line manual is invaluable, you should bookmark and read it.