Using RedHat 5.2 I have setup a public directory where all members of a group have full permissions. Files posted to this directory by group members show up as "read only" to other members of the group. If I change the permissions on a specific file it will seemingly hold until the original owner makes changes to the file and then it reverts to "read only" for the rest of the group.

Also is there a way to set up a file so only one user can access it at a time.

I come from a Novell background but am new to Linux.

Thanks for the help

I realize that this is a very old post, ans seeing that the user who posted this well over three years ago has likely given up on receiving any type of answer some time ago, but I would like to approach this question so that it might be of some use to others who might stumble upon this entry in a search.

To tackle the first question. Using the 'umask' command the default file permission for detailed information you can look at the man page for umask or take a look at:

http://linux.about.com/library/bl/op...ewbie3.2.6.htm

As far as the second portion of the question, I am not sure of the behavior that existed with RH5.2, but in Fedora Core 1 my experience shows that when a file that is already opened is allowed to be opened by another user, but the subsequent file openings are 'read only'. If I recall correctly, the behavior for RedHat was similar going back to at least RH8. I assume that other modern distributions behave in a similar manner, which should hopefully address this concern.