The January 2001 edition of http://www.linuxgazette.com/ (in "the answer gang" column) solved an issue that's been nagging me for quite some time now. The original article is at http://linuxgazette.com/issue61/lg_answer61.html#tag/14 but since these things change I've excerpted the interesting parts:


In your '/etc/fstab', add the "noexec", "umask" and "gid" parameters to the appropriate partition:

/dev/hda3  /mnt/msdos  vfat  noexec,umask=003,gid=66  0 0

Obviously, the GID would be that of the "dos" group.

What we're doing here is mounting that partition with the appropriate group ID and setting the umask - this masks out the permissions that the mounted partition will have. The "noexec" parameter works with in concert with the other two to produce the following conditions:

Directory access under the mountpoint is allowed to members of GID 66 All files under the mountpoint are readable and writable by GID 66 The files are "read-only" to the other users None of the files are executable (does not apply to DOS emulation)

From this point on, if you want to give a user on your system read/write access to the files on that partition, simply add them to the "msdos" group.


It turns out that my Mandrake laptop already had a group called "dos" (GID 66) so I used that one. Works like a champ (if you don't forget to log out and back in).

I usually find one or two things in that column that I didn't know I didn't know.

-- TobyCabot - 04 Jan 2001


This topic: Tech > MsdosFsPermissions
Topic revision: r1 - 04 Jan 2001 - TobyCabot
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