Re: USB stick permissions

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Felix Rawlings wrote:
I got a Lexar USB stick working fine on my Slackware 10.2 box. That is,
fine in the sense that, thanks to udev, immediately after I plug the stick
in I can start writing to and reading from it. There is a little source
of irritation though.

The ownership of every file that I copy to the stick gets changed to
root.usbstick, where usbstick is a group that I defined. Since I am a
member of that group, I can copy files to the stick - but their ownership
gets changed. When copying directories, this always elicits an error
message, presumably because the cp code is trying to preserve the
ownership to no avail.

Is there a way around this?

Nope.

Remember, on the usbstick, there are no such things as file permission
bits or user and group ids, because VFAT does not support those unixish
properties. Any permission bits or ownership ids shown to you are
fictions generated by the linux vfs layer that translates Unixish file
I/O into access to MSDOS filesystem data. Those characteristics that
don't fit in the VFAT fs are left behind in the virtual file system.

[snip]


- --

Lew Pitcher, IT Specialist, Corporate Technology Solutions,
Enterprise Technology Solutions, TD Bank Financial Group

(Opinions expressed here are my own, not my employer's)
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