Allow others read write permissions by default

[ravenplenty]

I've done a fair bit of searching both here and elsewhere and haven't found the answer I've hoped to find. Mostly I've found very techy Unix advice, third party scripts, or 5 year old forum postings. The question is simple: Is there no way to have file permissions set to read/write for "others" by default?

Our design studio consists of four OS X (10.4.10) stations with locally stored files, but we network to each others computers directly to swap files sometimes. We constantly have to apply read/write permission in order for others to do anything with the files. (I realize that one solution would be to store our files on a shared server location, but I would still be curious about this issue.) I had hoped that if I set the root folder permissions to read/write for everybody, that new files would inherit that, but not so.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Raven

[cwtnospam]

You might try something like this folder action script:

on adding folder items to thefolder after receiving theAddedItems
	set com to "sudo chmod 666 "
	repeat with fle in theAddedItems
		set command to com & quoted form of POSIX path of fle
		do shell script command with administrator privileges
	end repeat
end adding folder items to

666 = read/write for Owner, Group, and others.
766 = read/write/execute for Owner, read/write for Group and others
660 = read/write for Owner and Group, no access for others.

For more information, in a Terminal window, type:
man chmod

[ravenplenty]

Thanks for the suggestion, perhaps I will experiment with that. So I guess there really is no actual built-in Apple OS X way to do it. This seems incredibly dumb to me. If I, free-thinking human being Raven, don't care if anyone else in the world can do whatever they want with my documents, then why can't I choose that as a preference? (sigh...) This is of course a very First World concern (eg. I am not hungry, I have a home and a girlfriend and a music collection, etc.) but still.

One question about the script -- and by the way I have almost no experience using scripts -- would such a script apply to all the subfolders as well, or do I need to apply it to every folder that I use? This would seem almost as tedious to me as having to change the permissions the way I already am.

Thanks for your help.

Raven

[cwtnospam]

Sorry I didn't see your post sooner. I think there's a Unix method that would be more permanent and wouldn't require a folder action, but I don't know it. I thought somebody would have chimed in with it.

To get the script to deal with new subfolders, alter the chmod line from this:

set com to "sudo chmod 666 "

to this:

set com to "sudo chmod -R 666 "

Actually, you may want folders to have permission 777, which allows execution and is required to open a folder.

[ravenplenty]

All this Unix/Applescript stuff is out of my league at this point, never really mucked with it. Am I so unusual to think there should be a User Preference for this kind of thing? It seem UNBELIEVABLE to me that OS X has been out for so long without this option. (Maybe this is a more recent change to the way it works though.)

It's good to know that there is at least some kind of Unixy Scripty tinker-under-the-hood way to fix this, and if I get desperate, I'll figure out how to do what you're suggesting.

[cwtnospam]

Here's a better version that will take car of folders and their contents:

on adding folder items to thefolder after receiving theAddedItems
	repeat with fle in theAddedItems
		set com to "sudo chmod -R 666 "
		set command to com & quoted form of POSIX path of fle
		do shell script command with administrator privileges
		tell application "Finder"
			set x to kind of fle
		end tell
		if x is "Folder" then
			set command to "sudo chmod 777 " & quoted form of POSIX path of fle
			do shell script command with administrator privileges
		end if
	end repeat
end adding folder items to

[trevor]

ravenplenty, since you are still working with Tiger, there's an easy and elegant solution that doesn't involve Applescript or using the Terminal. Download and install Tinkertool on each of the Tiger Macs. In Tinkertool, go to the "Permissions" pane, check the boxes you want to set as the default permissions when creating files and folders on that computer, then click the "Set default" button. (Actually in Tinkertool, it's not a matter of checking the boxes of the prefs you want, but the prefs you don't want to allow. The unchecked boxes are the prefs you allow, so it gives you the same ability, you just have to think of it a little backwards.)

Trevor

[ravenplenty]

Thanks very much Trevor, I've heard mention of that and may give it a try. Meanwhile, I hope Ocelot or whatever the new upcoming one is called addresses this. Are there not thousands of people out there being frustrated by this? Every document every Mac user creates is restricted, so I can't just send a simple Word document to someone else without manually changing the permissions??

I'm not crazy right? It is dumb, right?

[Red_Menace]

You could also use disk images.