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My goal is to have a USB drive in ext4 and to use it as a normal Fat32/NTFS pendrive (or usb box drive). I would be happy to forget NTFS and Fat32 and to use this USB Drive with all pc in my local net. By the use of CHMOD and CHOWN I would create a REALLY everyone drive in ext4. Every mountpoint should be for everyone. Tons of command line rows are written but no tutorial and simple procedures to make it possible. Thanks.

Gian Luca Brizi
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    You can use ext4 on your pendrive. The only problem is that only linux systems will be able to see it. But it really makes no sense to use a fs with a journal on a pen drive. You can have e.g. ext2. – Pilot6 Aug 13 '19 at 09:18
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    And what is the question? Go ahead and use whatever filesystem on your pen drive. – Pilot6 Aug 13 '19 at 09:19
  • Forget Windows is my primary goal. This is written in the question. Is is possible with ext4? I suppouse not. I want only a network with linux in my company! I don't want to use NTFS and Fat32. I know that Windows neddds to have an app to read ext4. – Gian Luca Brizi Aug 13 '19 at 09:24
  • "But it really makes no sense to use a fs with a journal on a pen drive." Read please I wrote: "or USB box". It means 2TB hard drive in the box! Can I use in my network ONLY linux and ONLY extx partitions without NTFS and FAT32? I want to take away a 2TB at home and read it with my Ubuntu Laptop. – Gian Luca Brizi Aug 13 '19 at 09:27
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    It IS possible to use ext4 on a pen drive, why not? Just format it to ext4. Notheing else to be done. – Pilot6 Aug 13 '19 at 09:27
  • What is "USB Box"? – Pilot6 Aug 13 '19 at 09:28
  • No Pilot6, Gparted writes the owner's UID number and the group's GID number. If I make the partition with Root for Gparted, after five minutes I reconnect the USB drive the normal user will not use it!! I need chown help. I need chmod help! Then If I take the 2TB drive away I have to reset all again!! – Gian Luca Brizi Aug 13 '19 at 09:31
  • Pilot! USB box enclosure with drive inside! You can insert hard drive into it, this question is for all mass storage devices! – Gian Luca Brizi Aug 13 '19 at 09:32
  • If you simply format a partition to ext4, it won't have restrictions on it. You can always mount it on any other system. – Pilot6 Aug 13 '19 at 09:34
  • You can use chown and chmod at the file-system's level / the mountpoint, or at the directory level or the file level (specific for individual files if you wish). Do you need help with those commands? I suggest that you use them with sudo until you have the desired ownership and permissions to get the access that you want to directories and files. – sudodus Aug 13 '19 at 11:59
  • First you should check very carefully the actual path to the mountpoint of your ext file system in the USB drive.Then I suggest that you try this command line, which will give full access for 'everybody' to 'everything' in that file system, sudo chmod -R ugo+rwx /path/to/mountpoint – sudodus Aug 13 '19 at 12:12

2 Answers2

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If you want an owner/group-agnostic file system for your drive, ext3/ext4 is not the right one for you.

Only filesystems which do not support Linux permissions like fat have an attribute for ownership/groupship: uid=value and gid=value. See the manual page on mount. (via)

As a workaround you could use a bind mount if you have sudo, but that is probably not what you want:

sudo bindfs -u $(id -u) -g $(id -g) /media/diskFoo ~/myUIDdiskFoo

(via)

I don't know of any suitable unix/linux/opensource permission-agnostic file system. Unfortunately, you should probably use exFat (NTFS is a journalling fs and thus not suitable for flash storage).

Update: I just read about F2FS - "Flash Friendly File System", but I don't have any experience with it and it seems to have a normal unix permission model.

pLumo
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  • LINUX only linux, I want to forget windows in my mind. I use linux in all my infrastructure. The Askubuntu is full of expanded command lines, this is a simple question that demonstrates how the linux world is made too mutch complicated. The answer you offered is near the truth! – Gian Luca Brizi Aug 14 '19 at 13:06
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A solution that gives default permissions to all, also for newly created files, is with a default access control list.

It is described for full in this unix.stackexchange answer -- the short parts:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/<device>
tune2fs -o acl /dev/<device>
mount /dev/<device> /mnt/<mountpoint>
chown <username>:<groupname> /mnt/<mountpoint> # Optional; try to use the name of the user who is most commonly using this filesystem
chmod 777 /mnt/<mountpoint>
setfacl -m d:u::rwx,d:g::rwx,d:o::rwx /mnt/<mountpoint>
umount /mnt/<mountpoint>

Problems might occur if you copy files with their set attributes; permissions might be preserved and other users might not edit or overwrite the files (but usually still read). But since the upper level directories are world-writeable, any user can rename or delete the files (and thus (via copying) also create new files owned by oneself and set permissions to 777). See the above mentioned stackexchange answer.

Golar Ramblar
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