Why not 777, because that would be stupid, actually I've never seen
default permissions set to 666 either the most I've seen are 644. 666
would let anyone delete your files. 664 at least protects your work from
erasure. While UNIX and Linux were not designed to stop you from doing
something stupid there is little to no reason to help you to do
something stupid. Most folks can do enough stupid things without
additional help.

I've actually had one of my admins do rm -f /* on a production machine.
It was good that we had most of the file systems mounted ro instead of
rw. Through enough errors that we caught it be destroyed too much.

On Tue, 2002-12-17 at 11:54, Jeffrey Pyne wrote:
> I guess a better way to state my question is this:  Why aren't the default
> permissions for a new file 777 instead of 666?  I have no problem with the
> default permissions being wide open-- I can set my umask to 077 if I want to
> restrict other people from reading/writing my newly created files.  If I
> want to set my umask such that my newly created files are executable,
> shouldn't I be able to do that, too?  I have a quote by Doug Gwyn taped to
> my monitor that says "UNIX was not designed to stop people from doing stupid
> things, because that would also stop them from doing clever things."  Even
> if it were stupid to have newly created files have the execute bit set,
> shouldn't I be able to do it anyway?  I've seen much stupider things that
> that (e.g. a root umask of 000).  And sheesh, there's nothing to stop me
> from accidentally (and stupidly) running rm -rf /* on a production system at
> 3:30AM (not that _I_ have ever done that, mind you.)
> 
> Just wondering,
> ~Jeff
> 
> On Tuesday, December 17, 2002 5:15 AM, G.D. Thurman wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 16 Dec 2002, Jeffrey Pyne wrote:
> >
> > > I wonder, what was the historical reason for making the default
> permissions
> > > of a new file 666 and a new directory 777?
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