Permissions and Umask

When a file is created in Linux, the default permissions for it is "666". For a directory, the default permissions are "777". That is basically always fine, but if you need to for some reason, you can modify the default permissions using a command named umask.

Masks

Okay, things are about to get a bit weird. You saw a little bit of binary addition in the tutorial and hopefully that made some sense. Now, you're going to learn about masks, which are a completely different thing than binary addition. To avoid getting confused, keep in mind that masks and binary addition have nothing to do with eachother, besides all the 1s and 0s.

Masks are all over computing and generally can be defined as strings of bits that set other bits based on logic. This logic is based on the Digital Logic Gates we learned about in the "Digital Logic" section.

Depending on the required implementation, different logic gates can be used for different masks. This means that the logic for a gate can be "AND", "OR", "XOR"... long story short, don't think of masks as any specific thing, just read what the logic is for that specific scenario and reason about that in your head.

One of the more common uses of masks we see in Linux is for controlling default permissions.

EX.
1  Binary:  6 6 6   // 110 110 110   
Mask:    0 2 2  // 000 010 010  
Output: 6 4 4 //  110 100 100 

EX.2  
Binary:  7 7 7 // 111 111 111  
Mask:    0 4 2 // 000 100 010  
Output: 7 3 5 // 111 011 101

Hopefully this makes sense. Honestly, you won't use this much, but it is good to know about.

The most common place where you will see permissions masks is with the umask command. Run it now and you will see what your shell's default masks are.

Now make a new file and use ls -l to see what the permissions are. Do they match?

In order to change your permissions that files default to for your shell:

$ umask 002

This umask of "002" converts over to being a mask of "775".

When applied to This will change permissions so that files come out RWX for user and group and R for other, but don't just believe me, test it out.

You might have noticed that when you ran umask the first time there was a leading "0" in front of the other numbers. That first bit is the special bit we talked about earlier in terms of the "sticky bit". There are other special types of files that can be indicated in the special bit location, but don't worry about them for now.

For your assignment, discuss which bitwise operation is occurring when the masks is applied. Answer in the appropriate format.