What is 'Permissions differ...'?

Question

Of late I am facing some problems in my Mac's performance. I have had to resort to using Disk utility for gauging the status of the Mac's HD and on both occasions, I found that there was this problem which came up under 'verify disk permissions' : permissions differ...[see screenshot, if this could help in diagnosing what the problem is]:
Of late I have been going to different sites on the net such as news and You Tube and is this problem related to such internet related issues? I would like to be enlightened in this matter since I have not experienced this problem earlier.

Answer 1

Whilst there is little point in using 'verify permissions' (you might as well go straight to 'repair permissions'), you can in fact ignore these messages:
As long as the report ends up with 'Permissions repair complete' then, as far as permissions go, you are fine. You can ignore the various statements in the report:
Permissions you can ignore on 10.5 onwards:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1448
Using 'should be -rw-r--r-- , they are lrw-r--r--' as an example, you will see the that the permissions are not changed, but the | indicates a different location. This is because an update to Leopard onwards changed the location of a number of system components.
Poster rccharles has provided this description of what it all means:
drwxrwxrwx
d = directory
r = read
w = write
x = executeable program
drwxrwxrwx
|  |  |
|  |   all other users not in first two types
|  | 
|  group
| 
owner
a little more info
Before the user had read & write. A member of the group had read.
After, only the user had read & write.