Permissions

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?