ZoneO-tips for Mandriva Linux

It seems that all files created in a Mandriva distribution are world-readable, but I don't like that! How do I change the default file permissions in Mandriva?

 
 

Well, by default, the permissions of files created with Mandrake are

-rw-r--r--

that is

• the owner can read, and overwrite it,
• the users who are member of the same group than the owen can read it,
• the other users can read it as well.

How do you know this? Well, type ls -l in a shell (or konsole). In graphical mode (konqueror for instance), right-click on the file, click on properties in the menu, and then choose the permission tab.

To change those permissions, you can use the command chmod, or, in graphical mode, this same permissions tab.

Now, here is the real problem. You might want the default permissions on newly created file to be:

-rw-------

which means

the owner can read and overwrite it, the other members of the group can not do anything, the outside world can not do anything. In order to do so, you have to start the control center, then the security tab, the Levels and checks icon, the System options tab... and change the value on the the last line: User umask. In my case, I had to change it to 066... Why 066? Well, it would take me hours to explain this, so I'll just give a few links: Setting Default File Permissions at Sun, Access rights: Linux's first line of defense at Linux Voodoo, All About the umask and Permissions at Sun. Good luck!

And if you need a little help for all those unix commands, I really recommend the book Unix in a Nutshell. It's really good, with a nice summary of the most important Unix commands, shell references, and all those things you keep forgetting about sed, regular expressions, or vi.