hi, this is probably a super easy question but it would really help me out.

I have an external USB drive that is in NTFS (its a backup of everything I saved when I used winblows)

Well to make a long story short, I have had signifcant trouble getting the drive to mount and let me browse/open files on it without going into a file browser as root.

Anyway, it woudl really save me time to be able to change the permissions on an entire directory (including the contents) but it seems each time i try this, it only changes the permissions for the directory itself and doens't include the contents. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks

Assuming you are using the chmod command to change permissions, add the -R option (recursive) to change permissions on directories and files recursively. See the chmod man page for more info.

Be aware that you can't change the permissions on the NTFS filesystem. If you want to allow users to read/write to that then you need to use the umask option when mounting.

Read throught the "man mount" man pages. Different filesystem types have different mount options. For NTFS, you can use the "umask" option in the mount command to allow "others" to read files. Alternatively, you could use both the "fmask" and "dmask" options to give files and disks different permissions. This allows you to have the "x" permission bit set for directories and cleared for files.

If you are the only user of the drive, then you could use the "uid" option. This options could let you become the "owner" of the mounted partition. You can use either your UID number or your username, as in "uid=julianpdx" if that where your user name on the computer as well.

Kernel write support is limited. With, it you can only modify existing files. I wouldn't recommend using it.

That's old stuff now, since I think 2.6.15 the kernel has pretty good NTFS support. The userspace driver is better (albeit way slower) but the kernel driver can still create files and do enough so Joe Average can use their NTFS partition successfully. Encrypted directories etc aren't support yet but it's stuff like that it can't do.

well hrm..i was comfortable just copying directories from the drive to a location on my regular user account
..i know that i then need to change permission on the directory to see it

also how do you open a directory that has a space in it?

grrr..thats not working. I want one command that can take a directory and change it so that a non-root user can read, write and execute anything within that directory.

As the guys above said. Change fstab (or use the appropriate mount options
if you're doing it manually)

As for the spaces:
either escape them with a backslash, or put the whole thing in double quotes.
cp -r /this\ is\ a\ stupid\ name /home/user/good_name
or
cp -r "this is a stupid name" /home/user/good_name



Cheers,
Tink

The support on my kernel (2.6.16) is limited. Look for the ntfs.txt file in the kernel documentation before using write support for ntfs.

Quote from ntfs.txt

I've discovered that the newer bash (3) handles weird file names quite well with tab completion. Type whateve you can of the filename , hit tab and it expands with spaces and unusual characters escaped.
Don't remember if ver. 2 did this.