Re: permissions and vfat

[Cameron Simpson <cs zip com au>]

On 16:15 13 Apr 2002, Caleb Chaplin <caleb videotron ca> wrote:
| Please excuse me if this has been asked plenty times before, but I'm having 
| trouble establishing read/write/exec permissions of a directory on a vfat 
| partition and nothing I try seems to work.  Namely, variations on chown and 
| chmod never seem to work on any folders there and root remains the only user 
| who can actually copy files there.  I'm trying to give a roomate her own 
| directory on a vfat storage partition with total control over it's contents, 
| be it copying/modifying files there or adding new directories.  Some google 
| searching yielded a hint that vfat was never designed with group permissions 
| in mind and therefore doesn't respond to them, but I can't help but feel I'm 
| missing something totally obvious here.
| 
| If someone could spell out the obvious for me I'd be grateful, thanks.

The problem is that VFAT doesn't have any concept of ownership or
permissions.  Therefore you get to make some of to apply to the whole
partition, what take effect at mount time. So you can have the whole
patition owned by whoever you like, with whatever permissions, but you
can't tune anything smaller.
-- 
Cameron Simpson, DoD#743        cs zip com au    http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/

If it comes down to your word against the cops.....the cop is a cop, so that
makes you.........a liar.	- Tim Simpson <tsim peop tdsnet com>