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From: "Mike" <mike2 AT myhome DOT net>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: Nuisance problem with XP file permissions
Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 00:48:27 -0700
Message-ID: <201701c3146d$109b7480$6401a8c0@SARS>
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I’ve been testing some new stuff where I’ve got apps/scripts creating new
files and directories and I’ve hit a snag with Windows XP and file
permissions. Its probably an easy answer but I’m at a loss with my
experience level with cygwin.
 
First off, in running Windows XP, I am forced to log in as a user (who has
Administrator rights) and cannot login as user “Administrator” as I would on
a Win2k box. So, when I installed cygwin, the entire distribution seems to
be owned by me and seemed to have a file permission mask of 0007 – that is,
all files have --- for “other” permission bits r-xr-x--- or rw-rw----. This
didn’t initially cause any problems until I started working on a new project
– specifically, playing around with the new RPM package testing going on in
cygwin-apps. Nevertheless, the first question is – should the permissions be
something different or is this “normal”? I did a rather drastic step to
avoid annoying permissions problems and recursively gave world permissions
to the entire distribution – yeah, I cringed too, but its not a public or
even private server, just a convenience tool box.
 
So far, no big deal… until I start working with tar files that already have
permissions set that would prevent the non-root user from modifying them.
Specifically, a configure file that untar’d with r—r—r— permissions.
Somewhere in the install process of this tar package something (a higher
level configure or Makefile) calls autoconf/automake/autotool (one of these
– not important which) to rebuild the configure file. However, with these
permissions and my aforementioned user permissions, I continually get a
“cannot create configure: permission denied”.
 
This too isn’t a big deal, I can chmod the file and re-run that specific
configure/makefile and everything is fine. But it strikes me that this
shouldn’t be. If I, the user logged in, have permission to modify a file,
chmod it, chown it, delete it, whatever, why shouldn’t the scripts I run be
able to do the same?
 
Mike
 

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