Re: POSIX acls

[Duncan McEwan <duncan%ecs.vuw.ac.nz@localhost>]

Hi RVP,

On Sat, 15 Aug 2026 08:14:57 +0000 (UTC) RVP <rvp%SDF.ORG@localhost> wrote:
>
> When you set an initial ACL, you have to specify values for all of them, as
> the example in the man-page shows. After that you can change only the bits
> you want.
> ...

Thanks for the response.  But further down in my message (I know it ended up
quite long so I quite understand someone not fully reading it) you'll see that I
(think I) showed I'd tried something like that below where I wrote:

> ...
> Finally, I've tried adding a -d to the first setfacl command (although that
> seems counter to man page claim that mandatory ACL entries for user, group,
> other and mask must be set before setting a default).  That seemed to get a
> bit further...
>

The "bit further" was that I no longer got "acl_set_file() failed: Invalid
argument" errors.

But the file I created had "effective" permissions of just "r--" for group
whereas I wanted it to have "rw-".  That's probably because the "mask" acl was
"mask::r--" despite me setting it to "m::rwx" with the "setfacl -d" command.

The only thing I could think of was that something was taking into account my
"umask" setting of 027.  But if you have to modify your umask to get the
behaviour I want it seems to make ACLs not useful as a way of achieving it?

I also noted that my hoped for behaviour *did* occur on an ArchLinux system
even with a 027 umask.

I wonder if this is only a problem on NetBSD 10 and not on 11 or current? I
don't yet have either of those newer systems to test on.

Thanks,

Duncan