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Miles
Asked: 2014-03-19 17:14:39 +0800 CST

Why does my umask keep resetting to 000?

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When I login anew my umask is 002. At least for a while. Then at some point, and I'm not sure when, it reverts to 000. This is very inconvenient and I'm now constantly living in fear of dropping files and folders with strange permissions across my home directory.

The reversion to 000 can happen after minutes of use, or after days. A few weeks after I first installed ubuntu it happened quite a lot, then it cooled down, and just in the last few days this issue has reared its ugly head again.

I can set it back to 002 with $ umask 002 but this only works for the current shell (as expected).

Some more information:

  • The tty at ctrl-alt-f2 has a umask of 002 even when my f7 login is at 000
  • /etc/profile says that umask is now handled by pam_umask
  • /etc/login.defs has UMASK 022 and USERGROUPS_ENAB yes

I'm running Ubuntu 13.10 with XMonad and (oh-my-)zsh.

In case this is useful, here's my /etc/fstab

# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>                                    
# / was on /dev/sdb8 during installation                                                                  
UUID=96f989e0-ee94-4bff-9663-3fa479a83ad4 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /boot/efi was on /dev/sdb1 during installation                                                          
UUID=7682-B8AD  /boot/efi       vfat    defaults        0       1
# swap was on /dev/sdb7 during installation                                                               
UUID=0d7d57af-9a31-481e-9da4-1032c94f57e9 none            swap    sw              0       0

Here is an abridged version of my crontab from crontab -l

* * * * * cd /home/miles/code/Checkin/ && ./node_modules/.bin/coffee ./client.coffee -n attercop -h secret1.com -p 8888
* * * * * cd /home/miles/code/Checkin/ && ./node_modules/.bin/coffee ./client.coffee -n attercop -h secret2.com -p 8888

client.coffee is just a script that sends an http request.

And my root crontab from sudo crontab -l reports no crontab for root

umask

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The issue for me was caused by a Sublime Text 3 plugin called Terminal, which is used to launch terminals from sublime files. When Terminal launched the first and only window of gnome-terminal, then it inherited the umask of 000 from sublime.

    In the hopes that this answer can be useful to those who are not having the same problem as me, I will reiterate some suggestions for how to attack this problem, garnered from the comments above:

    • Look through your rc files (.bashrc, .zshrc) to see if there are errant umask calls.
    • If you're using bash, try bash -x -l -i -c 'exit' 2>&1 | grep umask to find call to umask from your rc files.
    • If you're using zsh, try zsh -x -l -i -c 'exit' 2>&1 | grep umask to find calls to umask from your rc files.
    • Check whether you are setting a umask value when mounting $HOME. Look in /etc/fstab
    • Check whether there is anything strange running in cron that could change your umask. crontab -l and sudo crontab -l.
    • Perhaps try using audit to find the source of mysterious umask changes. sudo auditctl -A auditctl exit,always -S umask and look in /var/log/kern.log
    • 2