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quill
Asked: 2024-07-31 03:56:02 +0800 CST

not able to run shell if USB drive mounted with pmount

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A bash shell exists on a USB thumb drive. The USB drive is formatted NTFS If mounted with pmount, a few things don't work:

  1. I cannot run the shell as it has permissions 600
  2. I cannot change permissions although my ID shows as owner of the file

If the USB drive is mounted via file manager (mine is Thunar - the GUI of XFCE which is the GUI for XUbuntu) or if it's mounted by disks (Which I believe is really gnome-disk).

  1. No problems running shells - the one I want has permissions 777
  2. I cannot change permissions but in this instance I don't need to.

Why can't I pmount the drive then run the shell? Probably related, and not as significant - what's with the inability to change permissions?

A community member, with enough rep to initiate a close on my question has suggested this is a duplicate of How do I use 'chmod' on an NTFS (or FAT32) partition?
It is not. The answer in that question is a mount command. Such a mount command requires sudo and getting this mounted without resorting to sudo makes this a very different situation. Also, that referenced question is primarily about chmod. The primary reason chmod was brought up is because the original permissions after pmounting were 600, which would need to change prior executing the shell. chmod is not necessary here, if the pmount command includes --exec and --fmask 000.

mount

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    With regard to running shells after pmount. @steeldriver was close. Two attributes are needed, --exec and --fmask. The following allowed a bash shell to run:

    pmount --exec --fmask 000 /dev/sdb1 *mount-point*

    This has worked for USB thumb drives. In my case, they were formatted NTFS. I don't yet have an explanation for the failure that resulted in the question Cannot add files to USB connected external harddrive. Even if reformat works, can it be trusted

    For mounting external USB harddrives, I plan to use the GUI mount that a) requires a password to do the mount and b) mounts the external USB harddrive at /media/userid.

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