unix permissions questions

[Chuck Swiger]

On Sep 14, 2010, at 11:16 AM, doug at safeport.com wrote:
>> A bit of experimentation suggests that "chmod 7500 .procmail" are the permissions involved, which are silly.  No group permissions enabled means setgid is meaningless, and I don't see any value for using the sticky bit here, either.  Try using 0500, 0700, or maybe 4500/4700 instead.
> 
> thanks all - the context of this: the users involved do not know what the chmod command is much less its syntax and I did not do this. What I was going for was could this be a procmail bug or perhaps something more alarming (to me as a sysadmin).

The permissions here are unexpected.  procmail cares about clearing group and other permissions-- unless GROUP_PER_USER is set (cf http://partmaps.org/era/procmail/mini-faq.html#group-writable), which usually would be appropriate for FreeBSD since it encourages all userids to also have a corresponding groupid.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck