In unix and linux, do files and folders inherit permissions the same way that they do in Windows?

Question

That is, if I change a directory's position to, say, "rw-rw-r-- leon advusers", will subdirectories created under it be set with those permissions by default?

tkquestion · Accepted Answer

Actually no.

You have a directory permission and that is one thing.

When you make a file or directories under it the default permission for them will be determined by your umask setting.

When you already have sub-directories and you change the parent, nothing will happen to the children.  If you want to recursively change, you will do chmod -r command.  (-r says to do it recursively)

<edit>
umask setting?  It is called environment variable.  You set it like you set any env variables such as:

umask=666
export umask

Try it....

then
touch abc

Look at the permission of the file abc.

Then, set umask to 444
then "touch abcd"

You'll see the file permission is different.

&gt;̌̍̎̏̿̿̿̚ ZALGO ҉卍 · Answer

Yes, if you set the file permissions to set recursively.

Jaxbot · Answer

Yes. However, remember that Bob.TXT and bob.txt are two different files on Unix/Linux systems.

Happy <insert what you are doing here> !

In unix and linux, do files and folders inherit permissions the same way that they do in Windows?

3 Answers