On the order of permissions in "Get Info" window

Question

I know that the three permissions listed are Owner, Group and Others. Is there any significance to the order in which they are listed? or only to the rights assigned each (Unknown is showing up on some of my files, I presume because of a recovery from a failed hard drive...) I can't add a replacement in the middle slot, it always goes to the top, which would effectively give me Group, Owner, others. I don't think it should be an issue, but... I don't know. Anyone?

Answer 1

That's the default order in any Unix flavor. If you open the terminal and do a:
*ls -l*
in any given folder, you will see something like this:
-rwxrw-r--
followed by other pieces of information (Owner, Group etc.)
Those are Read/Write/eXecute permissions on the files, for Owner, Group and Others (in that order).
So in this example the first dash tells me that this is a file (if it were a directory, you would see a d instead of it), the Owner has full rights, the Group cannot execute the file, while the Others can only read it.
In order to change the permissions on a file, you can use the chmod command, followed by permission code digits (777 would be full rights granted to ALL users, where 4=read, 2=write, 1=execute, and 764 would match our example) and the file name, like this:
*chmod 750 file_name*
and so the owner would have full access (7), the group read/execute (5) and the others none (0).
Another way to go would be to use letters, such as u(ser) - aka owner -, g(roup) and o(thers), and for permissions - r(ead), w(rite), x(ecute).
So if I want to change the permissions of the file in the first example and add full rights to the others, I could use:
*chmod o+wx file_name*
which would add write/execute rights, beside the already given read access.
For more information, you can do a
*man chmod*
in the terminal.
What we see in the GUI is based on shell commands and scripts anyway.