Csdrhrt

I am trying to figure out why when creating new files and directories in, let's say, the Documents folder, they get assigned, by default, the following permissions:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 hello world    0 Nov 19 12:17 'New Empty File'

drwxrwxr-x 2 hello world 4.0K Nov 19 12:16 'New Folder'/

Shouldn't 'Others' have no access to my files? From what I've read, Ubuntu is by default pretty secure. However, nowhere could I find a rationalization for this behavior. Would appreciate an answer :)

The permissions model of Linux means that, even if you are the only user of your computer, you're not the only user on the system. Many services will create their own user account to run under - for example, Apache will usually run under its own dedicated account.

What you will also notice is that your home folder is usually only accessible to your own account - i.e. permissions 700 or drwx------. That means that only you can get at your home folder, even if subfolders within that folder have full access.

This combination provides a useful balance. The default permissions allow service accounts to read any files on the system that they might need to, but they can't change anything. Any files which are personal to you should be in your home folder, so a rogue service won't be able to access them.

You might find the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard a useful read. This outlines the generally expected permissions and functions for Unix/Linux systems, and most distributions will abide by this.

When you create new files and directories, the initial permissions are controlled by your umask setting. The application creating the item specifies the maximum permissions (typically rwxrwxrwx for directories and executable files, rw-rw-rw- for data files), and then the permissions in umask are subtracted from this.

So if you want more restrictive permissions, you should set your umask to remove the permissions you don't want to grant. The permissions you show come from having umask 002, so it just disables other=write. If you want to disable other=read/execute as well, you should used:

umask 007

Traditionally, the default umask 002 comes from the assumption that all the users on a particular system would be a cooperating community (e.g. programmers in the same department of an organization), so there's little reason to prevent other users from reading your files in general. If you have specific files that are more private, you'd give them more restrictive permissions. If the above assumption is inappropriate for the users of your system, you should use a different default umask in the shell startup scripts.