In article <3EDDAFBD.7040308@mindspring.com>,
Art Lemasters <slemas1@mindspring.com> wrote:
>   Why is our default umask 0002 in user directories?
>Is there any good reason for this?
>

Well, typical use is to create a group with the same name/gid as
the users' uid and make only the user member of that group. Then
files will be created group-writable and since newly created files
will pick up the group of the directory (BSD semantics), they will
have the appropriate protection level depending on where they are
created. I.e. your home directory will be group slemas1 and the
files will be created group writable by the group slemas1 which
you are the only member. Shared development files will be created
in a directory where the group is the development project's group
so they will be writable by all developers.

christos