Box 1: Execute If you are granting permissions by using only ACLs (no Azure RBAC), then to grant a security principal read or write access to a file, you'll need to give the security principal Execute permissions to the root folder of the container, and to each folder in the hierarchy of folders that lead to the file. Box 2: Execute On Directory: Execute (X): Required to traverse the child items of a directory Box 3: Write On file: Write (W): Can write or append to a file. Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/data-lake-storage-access-control