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Re: default file permissions



On Sunday 09 May 2004 05:10 am, Ulrich Fürst wrote:

> I want to use the same mozilla-profile
> for different users. But every knew file
> gets the permission - r w - r - - r - -
>   . So no other user can get write
> access.  I found out that I should set

Where is the file?  I don't run Mozilla, so I'm not familiar with that.  Is it 
under /usr somewhere, or what?

I really don't quite understand what you're trying to do.  If you're having 
problems like this, it seems the files must be in /usr or some other system 
directory.  I can't begin to imagine why you yourself as your user need to be 
able to write to /usr, let alone share files there among all your other 
users.  This smacks of being dangerous and poorly-conceived.  I'm not going 
to tell you how to do what you want without first making sure you're not 
about to do something regretable.

> the sgid/suid-bit for the directories
> but that doesn't help.

It wouldn't.  Permissions on the directory have nothing to do with your umask.  
It sounds like your default umask for your users is 0027.  This is a very 
sane and reasonable default.  It means regular files will be created with 
0640 (-rw-r-----) permissions, and directories with 0750(drwxr-x---).

You can change this if you *really* want to, but first I suggest you really 
think about what you want to do, and whether or not the way you're trying to 
do it is the safest way to get there.

Can you better definethe problem in terms of specific files you want to be 
common among all your users?

> want ( - r w - r w - r - ) . How can I
> change this, not only for mozilla but
> for some other shared directories, too.

That's what I'm really not getting. *What* shared directories?  Is Mozilla 
some bizarre exception to the rule that individual user config files belong 
in ~ and systemwide defaults are immutable?  If you yourself need to write to 
anything outside of /home/you to use Mozilla, something seems badly out of 
whack.

It seems much more likely that a better approach to this would be to devise 
some way to keep dotfiles (such as maybe ~/.mozilla) between your users in 
sync with each other, which could possibly be accomplished with far less 
potential danger to the integrity of your system.

Perhaps create a common user directory owned by your group, set with group rwx 
permissions, and create symlinks from individual user directories to the 
files contained in this common place.  I suppose you'd still have to tweak 
your umask to make that useful, but it would be far less dangerous than 
giving everybody permission to write to certain files in, say, /usr 
somewhere.

-- 
Michael McIntyre  ----   Silvan <dmmcintyr@users.sourceforge.net>
Linux fanatic, and certified Geek;  registered Linux user #243621
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/



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