In a GNU/Linux system every file or folder has some access permissions. There are three types of permissions (what allowed to do with a file of any kind, directory included):
(r)read access
(w)write access
(e)execute access
There are also other “special” permissions, but for this article the basic permissions will be enough to illustrate how umask works, and the permissions are defined for three types of users:
(U) the owner of the file
(G) the group that the owner belongs to
(O) All the other users
umask (user mask) is a command and a function in POSIX environments that sets the file mode creation mask of the current process which limits the permission modes for files and directories created by the process. A process may change the file mode creation mask with umask and the new value is inherited by child processes.
In practice with umask you can define the permissions of the new files that your process will create.
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