Umask?

[Bill Mullen]

On Tue, 4 Apr 2006 12:43:37 -0400, Neil Schelly wrote:

> I've got a debian system here and most definitely have the umask
> command, but it's not a binary or a package or anything like that.
> It's a BASH builtin, so you won't see it anywhere in a package.
> 
> Anyway, in answer to the question you were trying to answer on the
> BBS, default permissions are kinda decided by the process doing the
> writing.  Lots of daemons have options for default umasks, bash does
> with the umask command, etc.  That is the general term for how to
> specify default permissions, but it doesn't imply a specific global
> means of setting it. -N

A good example of this is that for Win32 filesystems (vfat, smbfs), the
ownership and permissions for the entire mount will be determined by the
options given to mount, either on the command line or in the /etc/fstab
file. This includes the umask= option, though IIRC use of the fmask and
dmask options in lieu of umask is preferred nowadays, to let you specify
differing permissions for files and for directories (respectively).

Basically, when asked how to set default permissions on files, one
needs to ask in return: "On *which* files?" :-)

> On Tuesday 04 April 2006 12:09 pm, Ken D'Ambrosio wrote:
> > Hey, all -- someone on a BBS I'm on asked about how to set default
> > permissions on files, and I immediately thought of "umask"... which
> > appeared to not be installed on my Debian box.  So I plugged it into
> > Debian's search page, and got essentially nothing.  Is "umask" not
> > used in Linux?  Has it been deprecated?  If so, what was it
> > replaced with?  Etc., etc., etc...

-- 
Bill Mullen
RLU #270075