UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I use User private groups, and have setup a new group 'team' and member users, and a shared directory owned by that group with permissions as follows:

drwxrwsr-x 2 holocene team 4096 2010-05-29 14:45 holoceneshardir

My objective is collaboration among group 'team' members.

shouldn't the indicated permissions mean that all members of group 'team' should be able to read/write/delete every file in this directory? Especially each other's files?

Everything seems in order, except that group 'team' members can not change the files created by other members.

What am I doing wrong?


Thanks in advance
steve.

What is the permission on the file ?

Even tho the directory permission accepts deletion within the group, the permission on the file itself might not.

Here are the files that each group 'team' member created.

-rw-r--r-- 1 holocene team 15 2010-05-29 14:58 myfile.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 libraryu team 0 2010-05-29 14:55 myfile.l

I think you might be saying that each user must change his file's permission to allow group rw?

EDIT: Verified that changing permissions to group rw fix the problem. I just wish a separate step to chmod the files upon creation would not be required.

Thanks for fast reply.
Steve.

They only hold read permission for the group, it's only the ovner who has write permission, which is required in order to delete a file.

Either the user needs to additionaly set group +w, or you will have to enforce this permission on the sructure through your mount settings.
The later part is only acceptable if the location where these files will be created are as a seperate partition, thus enforcing specific permission on the entire partition.

[edit]
If this has something todo with several users interacting on a common project, why not run it through CVS or subversion ?

Depending on the environment you're building, resetting those user's umask might prove helpful (or disastrous, as this approach is by no means folder-specific).

But why don't you implement a script to check and update the permissions of all files and folders in question at regular intervals by means of a root cron job ...?

Dr. House,

I like the idea of a cron job. One that was driven by a config file so that a list of directories could be specified that need the action. The action being that all files therein to be chmod'ed to allow group rw.

Thanks for the help.
Steve.

ps: House, great show!