Hey guys,

I must be doing something wrong here. I've only recently migrated to slack so don't to harsh.

I've plugged in my USB drive and it has come up with the owner being root and the user being root.

So....
I first mount the device into my home directory /home/kuiper/externalUSB

i do a ls -l and it comes back with owner root and group root

(using sudo)
so i do chown -R kuiper /home/kuiper/externalUSB
then chgrp -R users /home/kuiper/externalUSB

however when i perform a ls -l again nothing has changed

This is probably an easy fix but any help would be really great, i cant listen to my music ATM :P thanks guys

Are you (your username) a member of the plugdev group?

I'm not mate. Where can i edit the plugdev group ??
Thanks for your help. An ex Debby user here . Thanks heaps

gpasswd -a kuiper plugdev

That's assuming your username is kuiper.

Type this as root:
Hope that helps

EDIT: Too late I see. Different reply but same result.

ahh both of you are legends. fixed the probelm

I hate to be a pain but could u explain what im actually changing? im only 15 so im young and stupid and trying to figure this out from the ground up ..
thanks heaps

Sure, there is a file /etc/group, and it is a table with
each line showing the name of a group followed by a colon
and then followed by the users who are members.

If you know what you're doing you can edit that file and
it will have the same results as running gpasswd.

ahh thanks heaps. Its weird though i still cant change the ownership to kuiper. it still says owner root and group root
i can see the file plugdev:x:83:kuiper
but i plug the USB in and it comes up failed to mount kuiper

weird. i cant seem to get ownership or change the group of the external USB which ive mounted

I didn't read from the top, I just saw that you wanted to know how
to add a user to a group.

Good call that adding yourself to the group doesn't change the
ownership of the mounted directory.

I'm hoping someone more familiar with Slackware will comment on
how to set ownership and permissions on automatically mounted
USB devices. (In CentOS and Mint my user has access by default.)

Yeah same here, thanks for your help though. every little bit of information helps. have a good one

My USB devices automount and I didnt change any permissions or do anything in /etc/fstab

My user is a member of the following groups: users, wheel, disk, audio, video and plugdev.

You also have to log out and log back in for the group information to take affect.

I know another OS whose name I won't mention that does require a
logout and login for permissions to be updated. However with
Linux and Unix any changes take effect immediately, even for
users that are currently logged in.

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You are simply incorrect or talking about something else.

Any existing login environment will not see the change. A new login environment will. Most window managers that I've used operate in a login environment.

Permissions are updated immediately, but the groups a user belongs to are not (and thus the window manager will not realize your user is in the appropriate group until you log out of X [and the console you launched it from, if in runlevel 3] and log back in).

If your external hard drive is FAT or NTFS, you will not be able to change permissions (since Linux-style permissions do not exist in FAT/NTFS filesystems). Only the mount options will change the *perceived* user. If you belong to the plugdev group and the device is automounted then it should be owned by your user (assuming it is indeed a FAT/NTFS filesystem).