Thank you very much, Christos!  As I'm sure others are
also confused as I was, maybe your explanation would be a
good entry for the FAQ, no?

Art

Christos Zoulas wrote:
> 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
>