Conclusions

Access Control Lists offer extremely flexible permission management. At the same time, ACLs take some of the workload from the administrator's shoulders by shifting responsibility for access permissions to the file owner. Thanks to default ACLs and masks, the administrator still keeps control.

Data exchange remains a major problem. Because almost every operating system uses a different ACL variant, the various versions are typically incompatible or only partially convertible, so permissions are often lost in the conversion process. Administrators in heterogeneous environments therefore have to keep on their toes.