I did a search on google and found this: In your cron entry just add 'umask NNN' before your script executes: * * * * * umask '777'; backup_script_here Give that a try and see if it works for you. > This is a pure GUESS. Unless the cron binary itself > sets the umask ("Use the source, Luke!") before running > an entry in a crontab, my suspicion would be that the > umask would be whatever the umask is when cron is started > in the startup scripts. If it is in the cron binary, > I would hope that it's not hardcoded, but rather there's > a cron config file lying around in /etc somewhere that > could set things like PATH and umask and whatnot. > > For giggles, you could try setting umask in the > /etc/init.d/cron before the cron binary is executed. > > Where does cron get its umas settings from? > > > > it doesn't seem to get it from > > /etc/profile > > /etc/bashrc > > /etc/bash_profile > > /etc/ > > ~/.profile > > ~/.bashrc > > ~/.bash_profile > > ~/. > > > > is there a default system umask set anywhere for what permissions > > files will be created with? or is it only done in the source code of the > > program? and is there any way to overide it in cron other than running > > programs within a shell script and changing the umask within the script? > > > > useing the script method would mean doing it for each and every cron job > > ~1000 for one of our servers.