I may just work with file permissions more than most, but I prefer the octal for its density. It's easy to tell my coworker the permissions are wrong, it shoul

I may just work with file permissions more than most, but I prefer the octal for its density. It's easy to tell my coworker the permissions are wrong, it should be 755 not 644. It's a lot harder to convey that they should be rwxr-xr-x instead of rw-r--r--. I also find diffing easier. 767 is different from 777, which is easy to see. It's harder to scroll in ls and find the one that's rwxrw-rwx rather than rwxrwxrwx. The last one is that the human format is legitimately awful at calling out setuid/setgid, and those are really important to notice. How many people are going to notice that 'rwxr-sr-x' is different than 'rwxr-xr-x'? The equivalent octal is 2755, which is very noticeably different from 755 (or 0755 if you prefer). I'm not opposed to having the option, but I do think there are advantages to octal. Those advantages do probably wane if you don't have to deal with some of the more arcane permission sets.