Group Access to All Files

On every cluster, there is most likely a group of users who want to allow the entire group to have read, write, and execute privileges to every file they create. However, changing the permissions on each file individually is a major nuisance.

You can, however, change the default set of permissions for every file and folder that a user creates. This is done using the “umask” command.

For our air-quality modeling group here at CU Boulder, each user’s primary group is set to “henze”. Then, within each user’s .cshrc or .bashrc file, the umask command is used to modify the default permissions.

In our case, we use
        umask 0007
This makes it so that every file or folder that the user creates has permissions 770 (drwxrwx---).

This is a simple change that helps keep groups of users happy.