permissions question

[Bonsai1214]

alright, so i repair my permissions on a regular basis, but i no clue what it actually does. its also a common solution to many problems. you often hear, "repair your permissions then see if it works better." and it leaves me in the dark because i want to know what it does.

can someone enlighten me?

 

[samh004]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-gb) AppleWebKit/523.10.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0.4 Safari/523.10.6)

Information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repair_permissions