motivation
New Member
Conventionally a user will set his or her umask in ~/.profile. It might also appear in ~/.bashrc or ~/kshrc etc.
Since 2016 posts started appearing pointing out that programs run from display managers ignored the users umask that appeared in ~/.profile. I believe this is related to the move to systemd. However, programs running from shells respect the users umask, thus leading to a mismash of file access settings among files made even by the same program, and user confusion.
Some lightdm documentation I found says that it reads ~/.profile. However, we just did a Parrot Linux install,which uses lightdm, and to the unhappy surprise of at least one user, it has been ignoring the user's umask, and has been making all her files world readable. (I posted on Parrot forums in their help for install section, and for 3 days have received no answer, so at least among those who monitor that forum it appears that no one knows how to set the umask.)
In my opinion umask is an integral part of unix security, so it indicates an inattention to security details for a distro when a user umask is ignored, or even worse, partially ignored, with a different umask when a program comes from a menu than when it is invoked from a shell. This is my opinion other people might not be concerned when users are forced to make their files world readable to use programs from the GUI, or even think that is an advantage. I would be glad to hear the reasoning for that.
So my question to this board is: is there a linux distro or perhaps a dm that after a default install, users may set their umask value (setting it in ~/.profile would be conventional, but it does not matter what the file is called.) It has been a long time since 2016, so perhaps someone has integrated this.
Since 2016 posts started appearing pointing out that programs run from display managers ignored the users umask that appeared in ~/.profile. I believe this is related to the move to systemd. However, programs running from shells respect the users umask, thus leading to a mismash of file access settings among files made even by the same program, and user confusion.
Some lightdm documentation I found says that it reads ~/.profile. However, we just did a Parrot Linux install,which uses lightdm, and to the unhappy surprise of at least one user, it has been ignoring the user's umask, and has been making all her files world readable. (I posted on Parrot forums in their help for install section, and for 3 days have received no answer, so at least among those who monitor that forum it appears that no one knows how to set the umask.)
In my opinion umask is an integral part of unix security, so it indicates an inattention to security details for a distro when a user umask is ignored, or even worse, partially ignored, with a different umask when a program comes from a menu than when it is invoked from a shell. This is my opinion other people might not be concerned when users are forced to make their files world readable to use programs from the GUI, or even think that is an advantage. I would be glad to hear the reasoning for that.
So my question to this board is: is there a linux distro or perhaps a dm that after a default install, users may set their umask value (setting it in ~/.profile would be conventional, but it does not matter what the file is called.) It has been a long time since 2016, so perhaps someone has integrated this.
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