External disk - how to ensure readable by all without needing root perms? I have an external HDD. It's portable, so I plug it in all over the place. Needless to say, these different places have different passwd files and uids. The files are mine and I need to access them everywhere. Currently, every time I plug it in somewhere I have to sudo find . -type f -exec chmod a+rw \{\} \+ sudo find . -type d -exec chmod a+rwx \{\} \+ Which assumes I have root access, of course. I could run this command (without `sudo`) at the _end_ of a session instead, but either way it's a faff and takes a lot of time (it's a ½TB drive). One option is to use a FS that does not understand permissions, exFAT, for example. However I'm using BTRFS because I use the snapshot facility. Is there a way at the FS level I can disable permissions - leave everything wide open? Or if you have another way, how do _you_ do this?

Using bindfs may help.


root% mkdir /mnt/wide-open-backups -m777
root% bindfs /mnt/external-drive /mnt/wide-open-backups \
-r \
-m youruser \
-p 666


This gives `youruser` access via `/mnt/wide-open-backups` and they will see everything as if it was owned by them. The `-r` makes it read only.