CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macosusb
Steve
Steve

Reputation: 31

Why chmod not working on external usb drive?

I am using zsh on Mac OS Big Sur 11.4, and I tried to do chmod on an external usb drive with exfat format. However, it didn't work as expected. Why?

➜  ~ cd /Volumes/usb
➜  usb ls
➜  usb mount
/dev/disk1s5s1 on / (apfs, sealed, local, read-only, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
/dev/disk1s4 on /System/Volumes/VM (apfs, local, noexec, journaled, noatime, nobrowse)
/dev/disk1s2 on /System/Volumes/Preboot (apfs, local, journaled, nobrowse)
/dev/disk1s6 on /System/Volumes/Update (apfs, local, journaled, nobrowse)
/dev/disk1s1 on /System/Volumes/Data (apfs, local, journaled, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /System/Volumes/Data/home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)
/dev/disk2s1 on /Volumes/usb (exfat, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)
➜  usb touch test
➜  usb ls -l
total 0
-rwxrwxrwx  1 hengyuan  staff  0  1 13 14:52 test
➜  usb chmod 666 test
➜  usb ls -l
total 0
-rwxrwxrwx  1 hengyuan  staff  0  1 13 14:52 test

Upvotes: 1

Views: 911

Answers (1)

Patrick Abbey
Patrick Abbey

Reputation: 154

If I'm not mistaken, exFAT is an extension of FAT, which doesn't allow individual file permissions, due to how it stores and formats its contents. I believe its file permissions are dependent on how it's mounted.

Upvotes: 1

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