On Monday 08 March 2010 08:31:40 ubiquitous1980 wrote: > I have a usb flash drive which will not allow me to edit its files. I > have tried chmod a+rwx -R $files but this does still not permit > editing. Further, the files within the directories refuse to have > ownership changed via chown $myusername -R /mnt/disk. Output is: > operation not permitted. Any ideas? Thanks.
This happens when the flash drive is type vfat. This excuse for a file system does not have a concept of owners and permissions so the kernel has to fudge it. You are finding that you cannot change these for the simple reason that they do not exist and the kernel is pretending they are owned by root with MODE 755 or some such. If hal is mounting the device, check your hal config, looking for some likely named option. If the device is mounted via /etc/fstab, adjust the uid/gid/umask/dmask/fmask options to mount in column 4. Full details in the man page, under section "fat" -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
