Re: Owner and group of a newly created file

On Sun, Jul 01, 2018 at 04:01:16PM +0000, Philip Guenther wrote:
>
> This goes back to a split in behavior between the BSD-derived and
> USG-derived ("Unix Systems Group", spun off from AT&T) systems.
> BSD-derived systems always gave new files the group of the directory in
> which they were created, while USG-derived systems used the effective
> group-id of the process that created the file. Vendors realized the BSD
> behavior is more useful for actual groups of people, but they presumably
> didn't feel like they could change the behavior of their existing systems
> so they added this "setgid on the directory means follow BSD rules"
> behavior. Linux has always had a more USG/Sys5 flavor to it, so they
> followed that rule instead of just making the behavior the Right Thing.
>

Thank you for this information. I have been puzzled about the reason for
why certain groups were selected when I created new files. Usually this
has been ok, but a bit puzzling. This is very helpful to know.

Quick question. If I set the primary user group to or whatever group
the file has, will I still need to use rm -f on the file to delete it?

I'll figure this out for myself anyway, but seems like it might be good
to have an answer to on the list archives.

Chris Bennett