On Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 12:51:58PM -0600, Richard Owlett wrote: > I use fat16 and fat32 formatted USB flash drives
> When I plug one into my Debian machine I want totally unfettered > read/write access. > [when logged in as root or *ANY* user ID] You can't. You have to be root to mount one of these things, or to edit the /etc/fstab file to give an ordinary user the permission to mount one of these things. Didn't we tell you this multiple times over the last several weeks? Yes, we did. AS ROOT, you can determine the device name (which is dynamically generated every time you plug it in), and then mount it with some commands like: mkdir -p /usb mount -o uid=richard /dev/sdb1 /usb Where /dev/sdb1 is the partition you want to mount, and /usb is a directory you create specifically for the purpose of mounting the device onto. And "richard" is the username you want the files to appear to be owned by. ONCE IT IS MOUNTED, then user "richard" can read and write to the files and directories. To unmount it, you have to be root again. And then it's simply: umount /usb