[ale] another weird problem

Michael B. Trausch michael.trausch at gmail.com
Fri Jul 6 21:50:45 EDT 2007


On Fri, 2007-07-06 at 18:42 -0400, Sean Kilpatrick wrote:

> perms on thumb drives
> 
> I have a directory /mnt/foo
> 
> drwxr-xr-x  2 kilpatms users  4096 Jul  6 18:28 foo
> 
> I mount my thumb drive to that point and the ownership changes:
> 
> drwxr-xr-x  4 root     root  16384 Dec 31  1969 foo
> 
> and I can't change them back while the drive is mounted, which means
> that is, ah, "difficult" to drag and drop files from my desktop
> into that directory (open window on the desktop).  Nor can I change
> the perms; notice that only root can write to the drive.
> And, yes, I have been trying to run chmod and chown as root.
> 
> Does anyone have a clue what might be going on here and how to fix
> it? 


It sounds like you are mounting FATxx media (which doesn't support
filesystem permissions in any way) into your directory tree.  You can
use the uid option for the file system:

$ mount /dev/sda1 -t vfat -o uid=myuser,gid=myuser,quiet /mnt/foo

For FATxx file systems, that says to make the directory tree and all
descendants owned by user myuser, group myuser, and to not whine about
being unable to chmod/chown when copying files to the device (which can
be a problem for programs like Midnight Commander, when you want to move
an entire directory tree).

    --- Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
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