Linux – Where on a Linux file system should someone put media intended to be accessible by all user accounts

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If I have photos, mp3s, books and other miscellaneous stuff that I want all users to able to access from a common directory, where on a Linux file system should I put that directory? In /usr/share, or just in /usr, or create a new top-level directory instead?

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I usually put this in /home/media, I create a media unix group that owns it with a setgid bit.

As root, or using sudo:

groupadd media
mkdir -p /home/media
chown -R root.media /home/media 
chmod g+s /home/media

Then I put each user that needs to access these data in the media group.

You could also use ACLs to manage each user's right for the directory.

You could also use /srv/media if you prefer, but I like home for shared documents. Anything in /usr is to be avoided for this unless you're talking about static files.

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Linux file system

You might want to read the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard; it's a useful reference.

Your home directory is where most of that should go. Pretend you're not the sysadmin; pretend you're yet another person with an account on the system. Within your home directory, e.g. /home/pufferfish, you can do whatever you want. /home/pufferfish/bin, /home/pufferfish/lib, and /home/pufferfish/src are all conventional choices, but none of it really matters.

For compiled programs, whichever directory/directories you use, make sure it/they is/are on the PATH so that you can actually run them without typing in the script or executable's entire path.

The distributions don't really differ much. I've found that the package manager on one might install binaries in /usr/bin, while some libraries may go elsewhere, and another system might install things in yet another place. I generally have to do some research to find where things go each time.

Linux – How to set the default user in Linux for file creation

You cannot do this; the initial owner is always the object's creator.

What you can do is set the default ACLs to automatically allow read/write to everyone:

setfacl -m default:u::rwx,default:g::rwx,default:o::rwx /public/all

Also optionally set a default group:

chown :nobody /public/all
chmod g+s /public/all

However, none of these will prevent the owner from changing the permissions later.

An alternative solution is to monitor the directory with inotify (using incron) and automatically run chown on creation. Put this to incrontab:

/public/all IN_CREATE chown nobody:nobody $@/$#; chmod 0666 $@/$#

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Linux – How to set the default user in Linux for file creation

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