Ubuntu – Ways to set umask on Ubuntu for daemon processes

daemonUbuntuumaskyaws

I have an http daemon server process (yaws) that I would like to have server write any new files with a umask of 002, so that another user in the same group can modify, move, or delete files created by the daemon process. This is on Ubuntu 10.04.

Unlike Apache, yaws does not have a configuration option for umask, so what methods are there for setting the umask of any daemon process?

I found this answer about changing the init script to add umask 002. This did work, but I'm not sure editing the init script is the best way of making this easy to document and configure on multiple machines.

I also found reference to the pam_umask module here. It looks like this allows per user settings of the umask to be configured in the GECOS field of /etc/passwd.

Are there any other ways to set the umask for daemon processes? And what would be the recommended way?

Best Answer

Create a .profile file in the daemon's home directory:

#!/bin/sh
umask 002

You can find the daemon's home directory by running:

getent passwd daemon | awk -F':' '{ print $6; }'

If that doesn't work, the only other solution I can think of would be to edit the /etc/init.d script.

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