chmod fails to do what I expect
 

I've been trying to access my /windoes partition as user and cannot. I've tried to change that as root using chmod as follows:

root@rain:/home/tim# chmod 777 /windoes
root@rain:/home/tim# ls -l /windoes
total 1181280
drwxr--r-- 3 root root 8192 Mar 20 11:26 BJPrinter
drwxr--r-- 9 root root 8192 Mar 24 18:05 Documents and Settings
drwxr--r-- 4 root root 8192 Sep 24 2003 MATLAB6p1
drwxr--r-- 2 root root 8192 Feb 14 18:35 My Music
dr-xr--r-- 45 root root 8192 Aug 14 2003 Program Files
drwxr--r-- 4 root root 32768 Aug 14 2003 Recycled
drwxr--r-- 4 root root 8192 Feb 9 19:18 Temp


Yet the result is:

tim@rain:~$ cd /windoes
-bash: cd: /windoes: Permission denied


I must be missing something....


tim s

Have a search for
windows fstab permissions user

(or the like if it doesn't quite provide you
with the thread that really does it :})


Cheers,
Tink

yeah - my understanding is that the permissions/ownership that a volume is mounted with cannot be overridden with the chmod command.

um... well when you think about it it's a windows filesystem isn't it? so I doubt that the drive would even have any way of making the changes to or storing the permissions for the files... ie where would it store the info? windows file systems are just not set up for that kind of thing. so I think it gets some default permissions when you mount it (which you can control) and then that's it - you can't change it.

my advice would be

do:
groupadd winmount

then do:
usermod -G `groups tim | sed 's/ /,/g'`,winmount tim

(note the difference in quotes, some are straight and some are backquotes)

that will add you to the group winmount (and preserve the permissions)

then do:
grep winmount /etc/group | awk -F: '{ print $3 }'

to discover the group ID of the group you just made... and *then* add something like:

gid=xxx

to the list of options for mounting that drive in the fstab.

so what you are doing is:
adding a group
adding yourself to the group
mounting the drive as belonging to that group

and you may need to do a umask as well.
if the directories are not executable you won't be able to enter them

problem fixed.

thanks, y'all. You're right tink, I should have searched. I'm usually good about that....