On 02/01/14 23:02, Chris Stankevitz wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Please consider a USB "stick" that is unformatted but is to be used by
> multiple people/machines.  Ideally your instructions will work for all
> people/os/WM, but if necessary please assume that everyone is running
> gnome under linux

Well, if it ideally should work across multiple operating systems,
you're probably stuck with FAT32 or similar due to Windows.

> 1. How should I prepare this device so that it can be plugged into any
> machine and will be writable by anyone?  I suspect the answer will
> involve words like fdisk, mkfs.xxx, mkdir/mount, chmod/chown.  I'm
> most interested in the chmod/chown part.

If you go with FAT, there's no notion of ownership (I believe) so it's
not a problem. If you don't, I still don't think chmod/chown matters
as long as the user has the permissions to write to the stick when
mounted on their own machine. I might be wrong though!

> 2. How can I prepare the device so that files/directories added by
> people in the future will continue to be writable by anyone?

Likewise, I think they'll be able to as long as they have the
permission to write to the mounted stick _on their own machine_.

> 3. How can I ensure that all files will appear to have the same owner;
> or, if this is not important, can you explain why it should not be a
> problem.

I think it's not a problem, at least not with FAT.

> And of course if you can refer me to a document that explains this I'm
> happy to read it.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Chris
>

I'm not an expert but hopefully this helps to at least steer you in
the right direction. I used multiple USB sticks across multiple
machines across multiple systems in the past and I never had any
ownership concerns that you do. The only issues were if one of the
systems couldn't read the file format used.

--
Mateusz K.