[PLUG] Chmod question, before I mess things up

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:01:11 -0800
Mike Connors <mconnors1 at gmail.com> dijo:

>Rich Shepard wrote:
>>  As a rule of thumb, make
>> default permissions 664 for regular files and 755 for executables.

>Good advice, and maybe the least painful option at this point.

Yes, I can see that now, and it does make sense to me. And thanks Rich,
for the explanation.

Finding the files that need to be executable remains a problem. Just to
show what a mess things are, here is a short excerpt from ls -la on my
main ~/ folder:

-rw-r--r--.  1 jjj jjj  11968 test_pdf_form.pdf
-rw-------.  1 jjj jjj  1552141 thinkpad_ultrabay.pdf
-rwx------.  1 jjj jjj  2240700 ubuntupocketguide-v1-1.pdf 
-rw-------.  1 jjj jjj  4822994 ultrabay_adapter_40y8746.pdf 
-rw-rw-r--.  1 jjj jjj 20839 Baker03.odt 
-rw-r--r--.  1 jjj jjj  70 VLC_radio_playlist 
drwx------.  4 jjj jjj  Website

I note that all my directories are executable. Perhaps there is a
reason for that. But there is a PDF that is executable. Why? There is
an OOo Writer file that is -rw-rw-r--, where most plain data files are
rw-r--r--. Why?

Every folder on my computer has a similar mélange of permissions for
data files. 

Also, just now I created a test file with Gedit. It appears as:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 jjj jjj 5 Test.txt

So apparently jjj's umask in Fedora 11 is to create files that are
-rw-rw-r--. And apparently jjj's umask when he (I) used to use Ubuntu
was -rw-r--r--. I can change the permissions on the older files to
-rw-rw-r--, but what happens if the (now) me downloads a file instead
of creating it de novo? Will it be -rw-rw-r--? What happens when I do a
dist-upgrade to Fedora 12 - will it change my umask? I want
things consistent and predictable. Once I clean up the mess I don't
want to proceed to create a new mess.