On Thursday 26 August 2010 10:35:08 Tim Nelson wrote: > I've looked at and tested umask but it only seems to allow/disallow > specific permissions, not force permissions. Am I missing something? How > can I force all files/dirs created under a specific directory to have the > permissions (and ownership if possible) that I specify? Hi, You need to jump into ACLs. You'll do something like: http://tinyurl.com/257k9qy If you don't want to deal with ACLs and your requirements aren't too specific you could set the SGID, bit (Set Group ID) so that every file created under the directory will be owned by the group owner of that directory: chown myGroup /var/appdata chmod g+s /var/adppdata HTH, Jorge