On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:28:07 -0500 (CDT), Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote: > I have a highly-related question... > > Every user on the system is in his own group, so files for user "bob" are > created by default with owner "bob" and group "bob". Most users are also > in a group called "staff". I want to make a shared space for the staff > group where every file and subdirectory created within our staff directory > always has the group "staff" (recursively for the whole tree). This will > be our shared space. How can I do that? The sgid bit[1]. "chmod g+s <dir>; chgrp staff <dir>" and new files will have the staff group set. I suspect that the default umask will hinder what you want though. So, you can either: change everyone's umask, run a quick and dirty cron, or a fancy inotify script. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sgid > > The system where I'm most interested in doing this now is a CentOS system, > but I want to be able to do it on Ubuntu or any other Linux system. distro-agnostic issue. > > By the way, I really don't like this new scheme where every user has his > own group. I know that it helps to keep things private, but I'm working > on a system where I want more sharing and less privacy. I suppose it > protects us a little bit from rare mistakes, but it gets in the way all > the time. The people managing the system think we can have this shared > space, as described above, but so far we don't have it. Well, you can set a default group for the user(s). (usermod -g staff <user>) Hope that helps, Jeremy