On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 07:40:58PM -0700, Ian Kelling wrote: > mkdir also has the -m argument, so you could do > mkdir -m 1755 dir
Ah, clever. Then: mkdir() { command mkdir -m $(printf '%o\n' $((01777 - $(umask)))) "$@" } This still doesn't address the original poster's concerns if, for example, a web browser creates a new ~/.browserconf directory the first time it's invoked. But nothing bash can do will solve that. One small problem, though: it doesn't seem to work on all platforms. (This is with the real mkdir(1).) imadev:~$ mkdir -m 1755 xyz imadev:~$ ls -ld xyz drwxr-xr-x 2 wooledg pgmr 96 Mar 13 09:20 xyz imadev:~$ uname -sr HP-UX B.10.20