I have a fat32 partition, ~20G, that I use to store my music. It's mounted on /usr/share/yasgur/.

However, I'm getting strange messages.....

~$ madplay /usr/share/yasgur/Led\ Zeppelin/IV/*
MPEG Audio Decoder 0.15.2 (beta) - Copyright © 2000-2004 Robert Leslie et al.
/usr/share/yasgur/Led Zeppelin/IV/*: Permission denied

This never used to happen! (I only switched it to fat32 so that I can play my music from windows as well.) Root can access rwx it just fine, of course... but the behavior from another user is bizarre:

~$ cd /usr/share/yasgur/Led\ Zeppelin/IV/
-bash: cd: /usr/share/yasgur/Led Zeppelin/IV/: Permission denied
~$ cd /usr/share/yasgur/Led\ Zeppelin/
-bash: cd: /usr/share/yasgur/Led Zeppelin/: Permission denied
~$ cd /usr/share/yasgur/
-bash: cd: /usr/share/yasgur/: Permission denied

But:

~$ ls /usr/share/yasgur | head
311/
AK\ 1200/
AYWKUBTTOD/
Against\ All\ Authority/
Amon\ Tobin/
Audio\ Ecstacy/
Audioslave/
Banco\ De\ Gaia/
Barenaked\ Ladies/
Basement\ Jaxx/

yet for some reason:

~$ ls /usr/share/yasgur/Led\ Zeppelin
/usr/bin/ls: /usr/share/yasgur/Led Zeppelin: Permission denied

Can anyone IMAGINE why this might be?

other info maybe worth knowing:
~$ cat /etc/fstab
/dev/hda2 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb1 / ext2 defaults 1 1
/dev/hda1 /boot ext2 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdb2 /usr/share/yasgur vfat defaults 1 0
/dev/hda3 /mnt/winxp ntfs ro 1 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

~$ ls -l /usr/share/yasgur -d
drwxr--r-- 133 root root 16384 1969-12-31 19:00 /usr/share/yasgur/

But:

~$ ls -l /usr/share/yasgur | head
/usr/bin/ls: /usr/share/yasgur/311: Permission denied
/usr/bin/ls: /usr/share/yasgur/AK 1200: Permission denied
/usr/bin/ls: /usr/share/yasgur/AYWKUBTTOD: Permission denied
/usr/bin/ls: /usr/share/yasgur/Against All Authority: Permission denied
/usr/bin/ls: /usr/share/yasgur/Amon Tobin: Permission denied
/usr/bin/ls: /usr/share/yasgur/Audio Ecstacy: Permission denied
/usr/bin/ls: /usr/share/yasgur/Audioslave: Permission denied
[snip]

Weird, no?

Hi,

it has to do with the permissions: FAT32 cannot store permission information, so the permissions are set at mount time. Because your /usr/share/yasgur is drwxr--r-- you (as normal user) can Read that directory (i.e. its contents), but you cannot cd into it (because the X permission is not set, only for root).

X for files means the may be executed; X for directories means you can cd into them.

If you want all users to have full read permission, change the line in /etc/fstab to "/dev/hdb2 /usr/share/yasgur vfat defaults,umask=022 1 0". Then all directories (and files) will show up as being rxwr-xr-x. If you want to give everyone write permission, then use umask=000.

You'll need to unmount and remount the partition for the changes to take effect.

Greets,
nukkel

Aaaah, I see! I didn't realize cd was considered x. :P

Thanks a bunch!

--S

No problem -- it's a little known thing, 'cos mostly when you mkdir a new directory x is already set...

nukkel

P.S. If you don't want all users to access the dir, you can use uid=... and gid=... options in /etc/fstab to set the user and group, instead of the default (root). But it needs numerical values however
E.g. I have a vfat partition as well and created a separate group for it, then using umask=007 all users you put in that group have full access