[Gllug] File permissions and umask on Ubuntu (and I think probably, Debian)

- Tethys tethys at gmail.com
Mon Jan 8 12:55:40 UTC 2007


On 1/8/07, Philip Hands <phil at hands.com> wrote:

> As I remember it, this was a completely intentional decision, to avoid the
> possibility of people setting up systems that were less secure than they
> thought they were -- since many people coming to Linux from Unix will
> assume a system-wide umask of 022.

Correct. IIRC, it was originally a Red Hat-ism that the other distros
picked up on. RH had a paper about the rationale behind it, but my
Google-fu isn't giving me a pointer to it.

> Unfortunately, you came across the gdm bug as a result (thanks for that
> tip, BTW -- I normally solve that by telling my xterms to act as login
> shells, and so execute /etc/profile, so I'd not worked out that it was
> GDM's fault -- I'll be switching to the Xsession workaround from now on)

Indeed. My girlfriend has been bugging me about not being able to
write to files in a supposedly shared directory. I'd been confused
about this, because they *should* have been writable by her. Now it
seems the GDM bug overwriting my umask is the likely cause.

Tet
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