Re: file permisions

[Stephen J. Turnbull <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> John == John Dean <john [at] rygannon.screaming.net> writes:

John> You can set or reset the attributes you want. Win9x/DOS
John> knows nothing about Linux permissions. The problem is
John> Win9x/DOS not Linux

AFAIK, you can set DOS permissions, and under Win95 as well. (Dunno
if you can get at the Archive bit.) It's not like FAT systems are
incredibly complex.... I don't know what happens with file-sharing,
but presumably you can do those operations with samba and smbclient.

The problem is that DOS/Win is a _single-user_ system. This means
that when you mount, you cannot distinguish among users. _But you can
choose which user.group owns the Win95 file system at mount time,
there are options uid and gid:

mount -o uid=0,gid=0 -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/garbage

AFAIK, basically the permissions on /mnt/garbage are treated as a
UMASK against the DOS permissions (ie, you get the minimum of the Unix
mode bits on /mnt/garbage and the DOS mode bits on a file). Of
course, just like anywhere else in a Unix FS, you have to be owner or
root to change permissions.

Alternatively, you can put the user option in /etc/fstab for the
VFAT partition. Then any user can mount it, and the mounting
process's uid and gid are the default (you can explicitly set with the
uid and gid options).

Disclaimer: at my house, I do the nappies; my wife does the Windows.
I think she has the dirtier job.

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