Can I, as a user, change the default chmod settings for my account?

Question

I work in a shared computing environment and the default setting is r-x for group and others; it's upto the users to change this. I can chmod and change the permissions for all the files. However any new files created all have the default permissions. Is there anyway to change that so that I don't have to chmod everytime or run chmod as a cronjob?

Answer 1

The setting you're looking for is called the umask, and that's also the name of the command that changes it. To make a persistent change, add a umask command to your shell startup file -- probably named .profile or .bash_profile, in your home directory; if you don't seem to have any such file, post the output of these commands:

$ grep $LOGNAME /etc/passwd
$ (cd; ls -ld .??*)