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Prateek
Asked: 2011-11-09 07:34:18 +0800 CST

How to get apt to make files in /var/cache/apt/archives always world-readable?

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I want the files in/var/cache/apt/archives to always have read permissions for everyone. That is, whenever apt downloads a new file into this directory, it should make it world-readable. This is not the case currently, an example entry from ls -l /var/cache/apt/archives looks like this:

-rw------- 1 root root 26928 2009-05-03 20:34 /var/cache/apt/archives/sl_3.03-16_amd64.deb

What should I do to have the files always world-readable?

(Aside: I want this because I have a few Ubuntu laptops on a LAN and using scp or rsync I occasionally copy /var/cache/apt/archivesfrom one laptop to the other. I don't use apt-cacher or squid-deb-proxy etc because at any point any subset of the laptops might be connected to the network; I have no central server.)

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1 Answers

  1. APT is affected by the umask of root which is inherited from the global setting from /etc/profile. You've likely a line in it with umask 077. To make the files world-readable by default, you'll have to change it to:

    umask 022

    To change default the permissions of existing files, run:

    sudo chmod 644 /var/cache/apt/archives/*

    To copy archives from one machine to another, you can use netcat. On the source machine (ip = 10.0.0.2) which has .deb files to be distributed you need to install netcat-traditional and run:

    cd /var/cache/apt/archives
tar c * | nc.traditional -l -p 1234

    Replace * by the files you want to copy.

    On the target machine, run:

    nc 10.0.0.2 1234 | sudo tar xv -C /var/cache/apt/archives
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