Inherit permissions from parent folder

[MrTwister]

How do I make files and folders inherit permissions from the parent folder?

I set permissions for my 'Files' folder within my 'Home' folder as:

Me - read & write
everyone - no access

But files and folders inside my 'Files' folder do not inherit permissions. They get permission attributes like:

Me - read & write
staff - read only or wheel - read only
everyone - read only

By the way what is 'staff' and 'wheel'?

 

[maflynn]

Changing permissions do not trickle down, but AFAIK, they inherit their permissions at time of creation.

You can force the permissions to what you want by using the terminal command chown. I'd do a "man chown" (without quotes) in the terminal to see how to properly type in the syntax if you're not familiar with the command. You can add a -R flag to be recursive.

 

[MrTwister]

Changing permissions do not trickle down, but AFAIK, they inherit their permissions at time of creation.

You can force the permissions to what you want by using the terminal command chown. I'd do a "man chown" (without quotes) in the terminal to see how to properly type in the syntax if you're not familiar with the command. You can add a -R flag to be recursive.

Why is it that difficult?

So all users on the computer get read access to daughter files I create in my folders (not protected in FileVault)? Even if I manually set permissions in the top level folder? What is the idea of this behaviour?

 

[maflynn]

Actually I just tested it out, and even creating new folders, it defaults to my account, staff and everyone as groups, so in my test example it did not inherit its permissions from the parent (which I manually set to a specific value)

Personally, I do not find terminal commands to be difficult but YMMV. Why does it do this, I have no idea, ask apple

 

[Hal Itosis]

How do I make files and folders inherit permissions from the parent folder?

Generally speaking, you don't. Standard behavior is that: permissions of an item upon creation are determined by something called a umask. The only thing "inherited" from the parent folder is the group membership. [one could possibly configure some ACLs to implement a forced permissions structure, but typically one manipulates the umask to achieve that goal.]

By the way what is 'staff' and 'wheel'?

Those are groups. [you might want to read up on such Unix concepts.]

So all users on the computer get read access to daughter files I create in my folders (not protected in FileVault)? Even if I manually set permissions in the top level folder? What is the idea of this behaviour?

I guess the idea is that the parent folder doesn't determine the child's permissions... the global [and/or user] umask handles that task.

Perhaps this will get you what you want: How to set NSUmask in Leopard (be sure to read the comments as well.)

 

[MrTwister]

Hal Itosis

Thank you. I will dig into that.