[PLUG] Nautilus sees files, but cp does not

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:42:42 -0800
Dale Snell <ddsnell at verizon.net> dijo:

>On Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:04:45 -0800
>John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> That is very interesting. Indeed, all the files in ~/ on my Jaunty
>> disk are 1000:1000, and everything in ~/ on my new Fedora disk are
>> 500:500.
>
>Ah, yes.  This has bit me once or twice, but since I'm pretty much a
>Fedora guy, I'd forgotten it.  Happily, you've gotten the problem
>fixed.
>
>> A more interesting question is why a few of the files on the Jaunty
>> disk are -rw-------, while most are -rw-r--r---. All the files in ~/
>> on the Jaunty disk were placed there by me, not operating as root.
>> For example, the three files that I cited at the start of this thread
>> are PDF files that I downloaded from the web page for the Applied
>> Linguistics Department at PSU over the course of a couple of years. I
>> am the one who downloaded them, not root. And there are many more
>> such files in ~/ on the Jaunty disk that are also -rw-------. Why? 
>
>Perhaps you used a different application to download those files?

I have never used anything but Firefox in all the time I have used Linux. The
period was over a couple years, so there may have been different versions of
Firefox, however.

>Other than that, I have no idea.  In any event, having a file with
>permissions of -rw------- doesn't mean that root downloaded the
>file.  It just means that only the file owner can read or write it.  My
>own preference for most files is to make them -rw-r-----.  Since there
>are no other users on my system, who cares if my files aren't world
>readable?  Closing off group permissions, as Jaunty seems to have done, 
>just makes the files a bit more secure, is all.  Honestly, I wouldn't
>worry about it.

The weird part is that it is only about one file out of a dozen. A lot of them
are PDFs, but the PDFs include files that I created myself and files that I
downloaded, yet other PDFs (that I created with the same applications at the
same time) were -rw-r--r--. Just to show how illogical this is, two were .prn
files created within a half hour of each other from Adobe Reader on Windows
2000 running in Virtualbox. One was -rw------- and the other was -rw -r--r--.
WTH? What was Jaunty thinking?

Well, since root-Thunar copied the files to my new folder and chown happily
made the new Fedora-me the owner, the problem is resolved. All that remains is
curiosity about how this mess was created in the first place.