file permissions on mounted disk

goggyturk · 10-24-2006, 01:52 PM

Hello all

I have a problem with file permissions on a FAT32 partition I mounted to a directory in root (say /shared - created by mkdir /shared as root).

It seems by default permissions are set to 755, a pain cos I want to write to the partition as a regular user. However, when I run this:

find /shared -name '*' -exec chmod 777 {} \;

it appears everything has changed to 777 (I checked by running chmod -v), but then when I try to write as joe user it won't let me.

What should I do to resolve this issue?

David the H. · 10-24-2006, 02:23 PM

Fat partitions can't natively handle *nix permissions settings. They have to be simulated during mounting with the umask mount option. Something like:

mount -t vfat -o rw,umask=000 /dev/hdb /shared

The umask numbers are the inverse of the permissions you want (022 will give you 755 permissions, for example).

You can also add uid=user and gid=user if you want to specify the drive's default owner and group.

goggyturk · 10-25-2006, 01:44 PM

That worked a treat. I adjusted my /etc/fstab with the options you suggested and now it's all as it should be.

Thanks a lot!