Good Afternoon,

My problem:

I have an external usb hdd, formated ext3, to use as storage. I am having trouble changing the child permissions of subfolders. It seems the files within the subfolders properly change permissions, but not the subfolders themselves.

To illustrate:

I logged in as admin (not root, just an account in the admin group), loaded several data DVDs and copied their contents to the external hdd. Then I went into root (sudo nautilus) and picked the main folders, which contained the numerous subfolders. For these main folders, I changed permissions to allow "users" group read / write access. I made sure to select the "apply to folder contents" option, or whatever that option was called.

However, later I logged in with a regular user account (in user group, not admin group). With this user, I could open the main folders, but none of the subfolders within.

Later still, I login as admin and check the subfolders. The "group" is listed as "admin" instead of "users". Thus, the parent (main) folder changed its permissions but not the child (sub) folders.

Any insight?

I don't think nautilus will recursively change the group ownership of subfolders, it will only change the permissions.

It is a bit more effort, but you can change ownership from the command line terminal, eg
(where "admin1" is the name of your admin account, and "folder" is the folder to be changed).

As far as I know, this has not been fixed in nautilus. I think your expectation of how it should work is correct.

neonsignal,

So, I was correct in expecting it to work "my" way. I thought so, but I so easily make mistakes that I figured it was something I did wrongly.

I hope the gnome / nautilus team gets on this. I never had this problem in KDE.

Thanks.