When I untar a file onto a USB disk which has been formatted with FAT, all the file permissions are 700. The original permissions on the files in the tar archive have been lost (they are mostly 644 and 755).
This is a problem if you are working on a remote Windows computer with a live CD and your data on a USB disk. Any modifications to files on the USB disk have to have their permissions laboriously edited by hand on a Linux system afterwards. It's possible to reformat the USB disk to say Ext2, but then it can't be read on a Windows PC or even a MAC (which is really surprising since a MAC is a Unix machine, but that's the way it is). When I was in the UK recently I checked a number of Linux books for information on workarounds to this problem, but all the books ignored it. No discussion at all. Yet FAT is a crude file system and USB disks a good way to store data. Am I missing something here ... is there a good way to keep file permissions on a USB disk which is readable by Linux, MAC and Windows computers? Best regards, Graham Petley _______________________________________________ MLUG-list mailing list [email protected] http://mailserv.megabyte.net/mailman/listinfo/mlug-list
