Nuisance problem with XP file permissions

["Mike" <mike2 at myhome dot net>]

I?ve been testing some new stuff where I?ve got apps/scripts creating new
files and directories and I?ve hit a snag with Windows XP and file
permissions. Its probably an easy answer but I?m at a loss with my
experience level with cygwin.
?
First off, in running Windows XP, I am forced to log in as a user (who has
Administrator rights) and cannot login as user ?Administrator? as I would on
a Win2k box. So, when I installed cygwin, the entire distribution seems to
be owned by me and seemed to have a file permission mask of 0007 ? that is,
all files have --- for ?other? permission bits r-xr-x--- or rw-rw----. This
didn?t initially cause any problems until I started working on a new project
? specifically, playing around with the new RPM package testing going on in
cygwin-apps. Nevertheless, the first question is ? should the permissions be
something different or is this ?normal?? I did a rather drastic step to
avoid annoying permissions problems and recursively gave world permissions
to the entire distribution ? yeah, I cringed too, but its not a public or
even private server, just a convenience tool box.
?
So far, no big deal? until I start working with tar files that already have
permissions set that would prevent the non-root user from modifying them.
Specifically, a configure file that untar?d with r?r?r? permissions.
Somewhere in the install process of this tar package something (a higher
level configure or Makefile) calls autoconf/automake/autotool (one of these
? not important which) to rebuild the configure file. However, with these
permissions and my aforementioned user permissions, I continually get a
?cannot create configure: permission denied?.
?
This too isn?t a big deal, I can chmod the file and re-run that specific
configure/makefile and everything is fine. But it strikes me that this
shouldn?t be. If I, the user logged in, have permission to modify a file,
chmod it, chown it, delete it, whatever, why shouldn?t the scripts I run be
able to do the same?
?
Mike
?



--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/