Set umask for another user

Posted on October 26, 2016

I have two users who are only ftp users I set them up using this guide

I would like to change their default permissions when creating files to 775 instead of 755.

It seems like what I want is umask.

But umask doesn’t have an option to set for another user, only the logged in user (umask 002) and these users do not have ssh login, only ftp access.

So I need some way of changing the umask of these users as root or sudo.

There appears to be ~.profile but I changed the settings in here and it didn’t make a difference

Can anyone explain where I can change the umask for these users?

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Liviu Balan

September 5, 2017

In order to change the umask for a user you can use the following command:

sudo chfn -o umask=007 username

Experiment with the umask value in order to suit your needs :)

Naimed

June 3, 2020

Hi, robjbrain. If you’re root, i think you can resolve your situation creating a file in /etc/profile.d/with this code:

userumask=$(id -un)
if [ "$userumask" = "user-of-your-interes" ]; then
        umask 033 ; or the umask you want to that user
fi

/etc/profile calls the files in /etc/profile.d/ after setting umask with default rules, so your custom rule would take effect. I resolve a similar case with this code, but there is no clear documentation for this use cases.

Regards,