Parent

parent is the term used for a process, location, or file/folder that have a level or container above them.

Examples of the term parent in use include:

• linuxquestions.org is the parent domain of wiki.linuxquestions.org
• the parent of a file is the folder within which it is located in
• the Squid proxy server can become a parent to a number of authentication helpers, spawning new processes as neccessary

With regards to file + folder permissions, permissions can be inherited from it's parent, meaning a file will, by default, take the permissions assigned to the folder within which it is stored. You can, of course, us the chmod command to adjust these attributes.

Whilst carrying out permissions changes on a folder, if you wish to enforce the attributes being applied on the parent folder all files + folders contained within, the -R option must be used whilst executing the chmod command.

For processes, any child processes will inherit the permissions of it's parent, such as the user that the process is to be ran as.