Slackware13.1 struggling with file permissions
 

Hey guys,

I've tried posting on the slackware forum and have got some good answers but still not what i need. (even though they've been really helpfull)

I'm trying to change the permissions of my external USB drive that i've plugged into my machine. It still reads user root and group root.

I've tried chown -R kuier /home/kuiper/file
Then chgrp -R users /home/kuiper/file

But it still doesn't change permissions

I've also tried editing
/etc/group
and adding my name to plugdev group

nothing seems to be working ?? what am i doing wrong ???


thanks guy

You can't do it the normal Linux way because your USB drive is not a native Linux filesystem (It's probably FAT/NTFS) so does not really understand Linux permissions. The ownership & permissions for FAT/NTFS partitions are assigned to it during the mount process.

Run 'df -hT' to see what filesystem the USB drive is.

Since most modern systems use udev rules to automount drives, it's not very easy to change this default behavior. If you are mounting it manually or using an fstab entry, you can tweak fstab to give you your desired settings. Something like this:

/dev/sde1 /home/kuiper ntfs-3g user,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

This will mount your USB drive using the specified uid & gid.