Why don’t you just use ACLs?

ACLs do not change the owner of files in a shared directory, which is what I need. ACLs do not enforce permissions either.

Why did you name it “maown”?

It forcibly takes ownership of items for the supposed good of the group. It’s a bit of a communist, so I thought of Mao. It can also be read as “my own”, so I went with that. Other names included “grown” for “group own” and “kleptown” because it’s a file kleptomaniac.

Name

maown - monitor a shared directory and automatically adjust file ownership and permissions

Synopsis

maown [options] <user> <group> <directory> [<directory>...]

Description

maown is a tool for group collaboration. It recursively monitors shared directories with inotify and responds to events that affect file ownership and permissions. File ownership is changed to <user>:<group> and group file permissions are made set to match the user file permissions.

This ensures that all members in the group have the same permissions to the file as the owner while also ensuring that the designated owner can manage the entire directory tree without restrictions.

maown can be used in combination with access control lists and other methods for sharing directories between users.

Note: maown must be run with superuser permissions to be able to chown files.

Name

maownd.conf - maown daemon configuration file

Synopsis

maown.conf

Description

The configuration file is read by the daemon to launch instances of maown automatically.

File Format

Each line in the file is passed to a new instance of maown. The line format is

<user> <group> <directory> [<directory>...]

A single line should be used for each user and group combination.

Empty lines and lines beginning with “#” are ignored.

Tracking Instances

Instances are launched in daemon mode and configured to write their PIDs to /etc/maownd.d. These are killed by the daemon when it is stopped.

TODO

• add support for excluding subdirectories (glob patterns | regexes?)
• add option to recursively change permissions and exit instead of watching