How to set system wide umask?

Question

I am working in a lab where we are running Linux (Debian and Ubuntu). Usernames and group names are handled by NIS and yp. We have some common users that everybody has acces

Answer 1

Both Debian and Ubuntu ship with pam_umask. This allows you to configure umask in /etc/login.defs and have them apply system-wide, regardless of how a user logs in.

To enable it, you may need to add a line to /etc/pam.d/common-session reading

session optional pam_umask.so

or it may already be enabled. Then edit /etc/login.defs and change the UMASK line to

UMASK           002

(the default is 022).

Note that users may still override umask in their own ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc or similar, but (at least on new Debian and Ubuntu installations) there shouldn't be any overriding of umask in /etc/profile or /etc/bash.bashrc. (If there are, just remove them.)