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I have an app that reads input from 4 (four) mice that are plugged in via USB in addition to the built-in touchpad. This is no problem for Ubuntu 9.10: hald notices the new devices and udev's them brand new entries called /dev/input/mouse4 ... mouse7.

My app runs as a normal user app. The files in /dev belong to root and aren't readable to anyone else.

I don't have a problem doing chmod a+r mouse? once, but the devices come and go with every reboot and every time the dang rodents are plugged in or out.

Can someone please tell me a script or something to manipulate so my chmod happens automagically?

2 Answers 2

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You can read up on Writing udev rules. I've never dealt with that stuff myself, so I couldn't give you an outright solution right now, but I'm certain it's in that document. Sorry about the RTFM solution. Hopefully someone else has more experience with that stuff than I.

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  • Hey, that's fine! Thanks for the pointer, I think I'll be fine from here on. Nov 16, 2009 at 20:00
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In case anyone else has the same problem, here's what I discovered:

Being a debian, Ubuntu keeps most of its rules in /lib/udev/rules.d. The directory /etc/udev/rules.d is only for manually introduced exceptions; they will apparently override the settings in /lib/udev/rules.d.

Mice are among the basic stuff handled by udev, I wasn't surprised to find a handful of settings for them in lib/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules. The paragraph of interest to me was:

# input
KERNEL=="mouse*|mice|event*",   MODE="0640"
KERNEL=="ts[0-9]*|uinput",      MODE="0640"
KERNEL=="js[0-9]*",             MODE="0644"

I willfully ignored the warning at the top of the file:

# do not edit this file, it will be overwritten on update

as I intend for this change to be temporary anyway.

I changed the first "640" to "644", unplugged and re-plugged two of my mice. And presto,

crw-r----- 1 root root 13, 32 2009-11-16 19:14 mouse0
crw-r----- 1 root root 13, 33 2009-11-16 19:14 mouse1
crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 34 2009-11-16 21:58 mouse2
crw-r--r-- 1 root root 13, 35 2009-11-16 21:58 mouse3

mouse2 and mouse3 became world-readable. Mission accomplished!

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