Hello,

How would I go about having the group permissions propagate down to the sub directories/files automatically?

Let's say you create a directory named "finance" and group named "accounting" and do:
chown root:accounting finance
chmod 770 finance

and when a user named bob creates a file inside of "finance" directory, the owner and group get set to bob:bob for that file and not bob:accounting. Is there a way to have the group permissons auto-inherit so that don't need to manually change the permissions every time for other users in the group when they need to edit the file?

Thanks.

I believe your looking for the umask command

something like umask 755 directory

That would set new files created inside the directory to
User = 7 or read, write, execute
Group = 5 or Read, Exec
Everyone = 5 Read, Exec

You may want to chown that directory as chown finance:finance

Sorry, I meant the group ownership not being inherited.
It seems need to do chown manually every time when a user creates a file/directory b/c it doesn't auto-inherit from the parent directory.
Is there a way for any new directories/files created under finance directory to inherit the group ownership from the parent directory?

It's been a while since I played with Linux permissions, but off the top of my head...

umask is the bitmask on the permissions, so if the default is 777 then umask 022 would make the file 755. You don't want to set the umask to 755 or you would get a file with permissions of 022.

In order for directory contents to inherit group ownership, I think they have to be 2775, or was it 1775? I can't remember. Try 1775 first, if that doesn't work go with 2775. The first bit is for setuid/setgid/sticky. 4 is setuid, 2 is setgid, and 1 is "sticky".

Check out the man pages for the chmod command. In there you'll read about the "set user ID" and "set group ID" permissions that you can set for the directory. When these are set for a directory, all newly created files in that directory will have the same group and owner attributes.

So for the directory in question you would set the permission, using the chmod command, to "6xxx" where where xxx is for the User Group and Other permissions.