Fetching & Permissions
What You’ll Learn
You’ve been navigating the filesystem, reading files, and searching through content. Now it’s time to reach beyond your machine and pull data from the internet — and then learn how Linux decides who gets to do what with files.
This module covers three skills that come up constantly when working with AI coding tools:
- Downloading data from the web using
curlandwget - Understanding file permissions — what that
-rwxr-xr-xstring actually means - Reading and running shell scripts — the
.shfiles that AI tools love to create
These topics are deeply connected. When an AI tool fetches a script from the internet, you need to understand what it downloaded. When it tells you to make something executable, you need to know what that means. And when it hands you a shell script, you should absolutely read it before running it.
Try It Now
Type ls ~/projects/my-app/scripts/ in the terminal to see the script files you’ll be working with in this module.
By the end of these lessons, you’ll have the knowledge to confidently handle downloads, permissions, and scripts — three areas where blindly following AI suggestions can get you into trouble.