Of file modes, umasks and fmasks, and mounting FAT devices (Shallow Thoughts)

Of file modes, umasks and fmasks, and mounting FAT devices

I have a bunch of devices that use VFAT filesystems. MP3 players, camera SD cards, SD cards in my Android tablet. I mount them through /etc/fstab, and the files always look executable, so when I ls -f them, they all have asterisks after their names. I don't generally execute files on these devices; I'd prefer the files to have a mode that doesn't make them look executable.

I'd like the files to be mode 644 (or 0644 in most programming languages, since it's an octal, or base 8, number). 644 in binary is 110 100 100, or as the Unix ls command puts it, rw-r--r--.

There's a directive, fmask, that you can put in fstab entries to control the mode of files when the device is mounted. (Here's Wikipedia's long umask article.) But how do you get from the mode you want the files to be, 644, to the mask?

The mask (which corresponds to the umask command) represent the bits you don't want to have set. So, for instance, if you don't want the world-execute bit (1) set, you'd put 1 in the mask. If you don't want the world-write bit (2) set, as you likely don't, put 2 in the mask. So that's already a clue that I'm going to want the rightmost byte to be 3: I don't want files mounted from my MP3 player to be either world writable or executable.

But I also don't want to have to puzzle out the details of all nine bits every time I set an fmask. Isn't there some way I can take the mode I want the files to be -- 644 -- and turn them into the mask I'd need to put in /etc/fstab or set as a umask?

Fortunately, there is. It seemed like it ought to be straightforward, but it took a little fiddling to get it into a one-line command I can type. I made it a shell function in my .zshrc:

# What's the complement of a number, e.g. the fmask in fstab to get
# a given file mode for vfat files? Sample usage: invertmask 755
invertmask() {
    python -c "print '0%o' % (~(0777 & 0$1) & 0777)"
}

This takes whatever argument I give to it -- $1 -- and takes only the three rightmost bytes from it, (0777 & 0$1). It takes the bitwise NOT of that, ~. But the result of that is a negative number, and we only want the three rightmost bytes of the result, (result) & 0777, expressed as an octal number -- which we can do in python by printing it as %o. Whew!

Here's a shorter, cleaner looking alias that does the same thing, though it's not as clear about what it's doing:

invertmask1() {
    python -c "print '0%o' % (0777 - 0$1)"
}

So now, for my MP3 player I can put this in /etc/fstab:

UUID=0000-009E /mp3 vfat user,noauto,exec,fmask=133,shortname=lower 0 0