mounting a vfat partition: (one) directory has unexpected permissions

deftone` · 08-10-2008, 09:03 AM

So, to cut to the chase:
/etc/fstab:

Code:

/dev/sda5  /d    vfat       users,umask=0000,rw,exec  0 0

Code:

bash-3.2# mount /d
bash-3.2# ls -lha /d
drwxrwxrwx 12 root root  16K 1970-01-01 02:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 23 root root 4.0K 2008-08-07 10:07 ..
drwxrwxrwx  2 root root  16K 2008-07-30 20:40 dir1
drwxrwxrwx  2 root root  16K 2008-08-02 21:24 dir2
drwxrwxrwx  7 root root  16K 2008-08-02 21:29 dir3
drwxrwxrwx  2 root root  16K 2008-04-29 16:47 dir4
-rwxrwxrwx  1 root root 542K 2008-04-30 23:17 file1
drwxrwxrwx  4 root root  16K 2008-04-29 15:14 dir5
drwxrwxrwx  3 root root  16K 2008-05-10 14:47 dir6
drwxrwxrwx  6 root root  16K 2008-08-01 17:43 dir7
drwxrwxrwx  2 root root  16K 2008-05-24 10:03 dir8
dr-xr-xr-x 49 root root  16K 2008-04-29 22:57 dir9
drwxrwxrwx 16 root root  16K 2008-08-02 21:34 dir10
-rwxrwxrwx  1 root root  39K 2008-06-06 09:46 file2
-rwxrwxrwx  1 root root  45K 2008-06-06 09:47 file3

As you can see all files and directories have 777 permissions, except one. That's my problem. I want to have 777 permission on dir9.
Any help will be appreciated.

PTrenholme · 08-10-2008, 10:12 AM

Is dir9 the "real" name of that directory, or is it one of the special FAT directories? (That question assumes that there are "special" FAT directories, an assumption that may not be true. I know that NTFS does have "special" directories, but NTFS also has a slightly more sophisticated permissions model.)

arizonagroovejet · 08-10-2008, 10:30 AM

How do you have two directories called dir9?

deftone` · 08-10-2008, 10:59 AM

I don't. It was a mistake (I changed the names manually).
PTrenholme, what do you mean by "special directory"? AFAIK, dir9 is a normal directory. I think I have seen this situation before, and I think I fixed it by moving the files to a new directory, deleting the old one and renaming the new directory.
But I want to find out why this happens, because it looks strange.

jiml8 · 08-10-2008, 11:31 AM

It does look strange, particularly when you consider that vfat does not support user permissions.

What happens if you unmount/remount the drive?

deftone` · 08-10-2008, 03:08 PM

Remounting doesn't change a thing.

PTrenholme · 08-12-2008, 10:26 AM

As I said in my comment, I thought that FAT might have some "special," read-only, directories although, as I said, I didn't actually know if any such directories existed. But, since your dir9 was shown as ro, I was wondering if its real name would provide a clew for others more knowledgeable than I.