Comment 14 for bug 78505

Colin & all,

the vast majority of stuff on a vfat drive -particularly a usb/flash removable one - is not executable. Having the X bit set for this data is basically wrong and leads to problems when (for example) doing a restore of data previously copied to the drive for backup as all the restored data is given the executable flag. Its just wrong on so many levels to add an execute bit to everything just to maybe help a couple of not terribly popular (AFAIK) applications.

There needs to be a change to the default to rw-r--r-- and a relatively clear way to change the default to one of the other potentially useful masks such as rw-rw-rw, rwxr-xr-x or rwxrwxrwx. Currently I am not at all clear how to set the default behavior - I can set the behavior for particular volumes which is mostly OK, as a workaround but is annoying when I'm given (for example) a flash drive from a colleague to copy data from. In this case what happens is all the documents I copy across get the X bit set which sometimes ends up meaning that they execute instead of open the application