Permissions on Mac

[prl]

On 29/09/2017 03:54, Eric Beversluis wrote:
> What permissions should the .gnucash files have on Mac? Some seem to be 644 while the older ones seem to be 777. I copied them all to Mac from Linux using a FAT32 disk, so I’m not sure they all came over properly.
>
> 777 seems wrong, but 644 seems not enough, though the .gnucash file on my Desktop seems to open OK as 644. “Group” seems to be something called “Staff."
If you're changing permissions using chmod, you may want to use the 
symbolic form for the permissions (using similar conventions to what's 
shown in in the "ls -l" command) rather than the octal value of the 
permissions bits.

So, for example, 644 can be set by using:

chmod u=rw,go=r accounts.gnucash

(u=user (yoU/owner), g=group, o=others).

There you can use + or - instead of = to add or remove permission bits.

The octal bits are:
400 = user/owner read
200 = user/owner write
100 = user/owner execute (the execute bit on a directory is lookup 
permission)
040 = group read
020 = group write
010 = group execute
004 = others read
002 = others write
001 = others execute

Add (or or) the values together to construct the octal permissions 
number that can also be used in chmod. So 777 is everyone can do 
anything; and 644 is owner read/write, group and others read only; 600 
is owned read/write, no permissions for group or others.

FAT file systems don't support the U*ix permissions, so when a file is 
copied from a FAT filesystem, the permission bits are set using a mask 
set when the FAT filesystem was mounted. That defaults to 777.

Peter