How to set system wide umask?
linux, system, umask
Solution
Both Debian and Ubuntu ship with pam_umask. This allows you to configure umask in `/etc/login.defs` and have them apply system-wide, regardless of how a user logs in.
To enable it, you may need to add a line to `/etc/pam.d/common-session` reading
session optional pam_umask.so
or it may already be enabled. Then edit `/etc/login.defs` and change the `UMASK` line to
UMASK 002
(the default is `022`).
Note that users may still override umask in their own `~/.profile` or `~/.bashrc` or similar, but (at least on new Debian and Ubuntu installations) there shouldn't be any overriding of umask in `/etc/profile` or `/etc/bash.bashrc`. (If there are, just remove them.)
Problem
I am working in a lab where we are running Linux (Debian and Ubuntu). Usernames and group names are handled by NIS and yp. We have some common users that everybody has access to that run the experiments and then we each have our own users in addition there is a common group that we are all a member of. How can I make such that all files and directories on the shared `/home/` drive (NFS) is read/write(/executable) by user/group? Basically what I want is ``` chmod -R 664 /home chgrp -R commongroup /home ``` or equivalently `umask 0002`. But running the above commands only fixes the current files in the folders and umask only works for single users and has to be run every time a user logs in ie. in the `.bashrc` file (and will this work for changes mode via gnome?). Is there a system wide command or setting that I could use to make sure that our commongroup has write access to the common files?