The umask of 022 or 002 is directly related to the "normal" user being in the global "users" group, or the user's own group containing only the one user (what a waste); therefore, the umask should be specified.
The SysV, BSD, and even the GNU/Linux man pages say that the default umask is 022; however, I do see your point regarding 077 if I have sensitive information that I don't want my fellow /home users to read; however, that is user configurable option (beyond the default behavior) that does not need to be specified. "The umask is used by open(2) to set initial file permissions on a newly-created file. Specifically, permissions in the umask are turned off from the mode argument to open(2) (so, for example, the common umask default value of 022 results in new files being created with permission 0666 & ~022 = 0644 = rw-r--r-- in the usual case where the mode is specified as 0666). " Since there are only two of use bantering over this topic, I would be inclined to leave what is there as-is until we have a consensus. Best regards, PS: Just because I'm a fundamentalist doesn't mean that I'm an academic. :-) George Kraft IV [EMAIL PROTECTED] 512-838-2688; t/l 678-2688 IBM Linux Technology Center & Linux Standards
