Public bug reported:

Latest GNOME changed the interface to handle file / folder permissions.
It is limited and wrong in many ways.

For folders, it has a checkbox to allow "execution of the file as a
program"...  I do not know that it means. As far as I know, there is no
execution to folders. This is for regular files. On folder this allows
to change working directory into it. Plus, this setting changes what?
Permission to the user, group or others? It is not clear. All I can
Assume is that this changes the 3 at once, what is limited.

It also asks about permissions to folder access / file access per user,
group and others (through two drop down menus each). The first drop down
menu has 4 to 5 options (4 to user, 5 to the rest) and the second has 3
to 4 options. This leads to 12 combinations for the user and 20
combinations to the rest. Oh! What does this mean, if all that
traditional permissions exists are read / write? There are only 4
possibilities. If one include "execution", there are only 8
combinations.

Also, the fourth octet permissions is missing. The same that is used to
secure /tmp. On Linux, two of the three bits makes sense: the least
significant allows only the owner of the folder to delete it, and the
middle one makes all newly created files to be owned by the group of the
father folder and also inherit this permission to folders. This is
important specially in shared files folder, as each user can keep owning
his / her own files.

For file permissions, the limitation is not being able to change
execution permissions individually to user, group and others. Also, the
fourth octet permissions (the one that sets up SUID and GID execution)
is missing (talking about security, isn't this important?).

To summarize: nautilus interface does not explicitly shows that are the
12 bits of UNIX permissions changed due to a confusing and limited
interface.

Hope things get the way it was on previous GNOME versions, a simple
table of checkboxes. Much easier to operate, see and understand. It even
showed the octal permissions value.

** Affects: nautilus (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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Wrong interface to file permissions on Nautilus
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/121580
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Desktop Bugs, which is a bug contact for nautilus in ubuntu.

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