On 08/02/2016 03:58 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:

[ So I answered similarly to another patch, but I'll just re-iterate
and change the subject line so that it stands out a bit from the
millions of actual patches ]

On Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 1:42 PM, Pavel Machek [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Everyone knows what 0644 is, but noone can read S_IRUSR | S_IWUSR |
S_IRCRP | S_IROTH (*). Please don't do this.

Absolutely. It's *much* easier to parse and understand the octal
numbers, while the symbolic macro names are just random line noise and
hard as hell to understand. You really have to think about it.

Posix even specifies the numeric value for each macro in the chmod
command's extended description:

  http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/chmod.html

Rob