[Discuss] USB thumbdrive, Linux only usage: FAT vs NTFS vs other? TRIM support?

[Matthew Gillen]

On 02/25/2013 12:18 PM, Brendan Kidwell wrote:
> I have had trouble with using Unix-native filesystems on portable
> drives in the past, instead of vFAT, because the OS wants to record
> owners to objects and those owners don't make any sense on another
> machine. Is there a simple workaround for that?

Create a single directory in the root of the thumb drive, and give that 
world-write and group-write, then give it set-group-ID bit ('chmod g+s 
dirname').

Every file created will inherit the group-id of the original directory, 
and as long as everyone's normal umask is set to allow group write, you 
never have to manually chmod or chown anything in that directory.

You'll have problems if your distro (or your users) change their default 
umask to not include group write in some mis-guided attempt at security...

HTH,
Matt