umask help [SOLVED]

[George Goodman]

> I have been able to duplicate the problem by having commented-out
> umasks in my /root/.profile.

Excellent, you have helped me sort out the problem. Firstly I had
somehow missed that the daily outputs we generated by /etc/security.
Once I had that I was away, thanks.

Following your instructions on looking at he script and the comments
etc. I quickly discovered I had a "space" at the beginning of the
umask line in /root/.profile.

I deleted the line completely and ran /etc/security which reported
that umask was unset in my .profile. I then added the line correctly,
without the space and ran /etc/security again.

This time all was quiet, and the problem is resolved, and I am now
fairly confident that my umask is being set correctly.

> #umask
>
> gives both errors.

as does this:

  umask 022

(space/or perhaps tab at the beginning of the line)

> OK, the problem is in the second awk script, where it is going through
> the .profile and /etc/profile files.
>
> Actually the problem arises in the grep command immediately before
> the awk script.



> Note that it is *NOT*
>         "beginning of line, zero or more spaces..."
>
> In other words it matches comments like
>
> # any text at all umask

Right, but my entry definitely had only white space at the beginning
of the line. It was either space(s) or tab.

>
> Bottom line, there are two action items:

Right, I am happy to report (above) that all seems to be well in my
server now, and I have again learned some very important stuff.

Thanks,

GG