If a user wants to (makes the mistake of) let others delete their files,
it's not "your job" to teach them otherwise. Compare to "real life";
someone leaves a bike on the street unlocked and someone else steals it.
Does it make sense to file a complaint to the police department about not
educating people of this danger? Now, if the user has an elevated role on
your system and does this to others' files, it may be "your job" to teach
them otherwise (ie easier to restrict use of o+w ). This is definitely not
a laughing matter.


On 28 June 2013 04:52, Bob Proulx <b...@proulx.com> wrote:

> Ben Lentz wrote:
> > I suspect I may get laughed off the list... but would you folks ever
> > consider restricting the use of chmod such that world-writable files
> > are reserved for 1) /tmp-style permissions (1777) or 2) reserved for
> > root-only users? Despite training (berating?) users, it seems the
> > default reaction to "oh no, I am having a permission problem" is an
> > knee-jerk execution of "chmod -R 777 *" in order to make the 'problem'
> > go away... however all it's really done is *move* the problem...
>
> More of a problem than chmod the more typical problem I see is when
> users copy files through a USB storage device on a FAT32 or NTFS
> filesystem.  Since those don't have Unix file system permissions
> then using them to copy files results in files being mode 777.  And
> then almost no one seems to fix them subsequently.  Sigh.
>
> Bob
>
>

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