On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 08:06:56AM -0600, Jay Kline wrote:
> This works fine if all you ant is the is a file to be owned by a particular 
> group, but what if you also want to change the umask for a particular 
> directory?

You repeat "umasks are controlled by users, not the filesystem" to
yourself until you get so sick of it that you write a kernel patch to
allow directories to have them.

> Say you want your home directry so that no one else can read your 
> stuff, but a shared "data" directory owned by "users" such that any file 
> created in there would not only be ownend by users, but also writable by 
> users?

$ umask 002
$ chmod go-rwx /home/me

It doesn't matter whether the files in your home dir are world-
readable if the directory itself is inaccessible...

Alternately, you can probably configure your system to create a
separate group for each user instead of throwing everyone into the
same default group.  Your home dir (and most of your files) will then
be owned by a group that you're the only member of, so 022 and 002
umasks are equivalent (unless you're in an sgid directory).

-- 
When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists
have already won. - reverius

Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss