Hello again.

I'm still learning, but a lot of it I am finding through reading the
groups and by asking Google nicely, however I have yet to find an answer
to this one.

I am trying to break a word down into individual characters. OK that's
not true, I'm trying to break down the file permissions into individual
sections.

I've got ls -l filename | awk ' { print $1 } ' which works (I worked
this out myself, so if there is an easier/better way of getting it, I'd
appreciate it...) Its giving me what I think I want (-rw-r--r--) but I
am trying to figure out how to break it down into individual letters. I
have seen examples of "case in (?r*)" format but this would leave me
with a lot of variations to consider when I am trying to translate the
file permission string into a pretty table.

so my question is, how can I change a word (-rw-r--r-- or equiv) into a
list/array of individual characters.

Thanks for your time.

Mitch.