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I'm mounting a filesystem as root and I don't understand why it is not owned by root but by an unprivileged user.

Here's fstab:

cat /etc/fstab
[...]
/dev/sdb        /mnt/projects ext4 defaults 0 2

And here's what happens when mounting:

ls -al /mnt/projects/ 
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 mai   25 17:55 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 mai   25 17:55 ..

mount /dev/sdb

ls -al /mnt/projects/ 
total 24
drwx------ 3 jerome jerome  4096 mai   25 17:52 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root   root    4096 mai   25 17:55 ..
drwx------ 2 root   root   16384 mai   25 17:52 lost+found

I'm not using sudo. I switch to root user with the su command.

The user that gains ownership is my normal user, the first declared when installing the system (uid: 1000).

The mount point is owned by root. I don't think that matters anyway.

My normal user doesn't have the permissions to mount the filesystem here himself.

Jérôme
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1 Answers1

22

This means that the file system being mounted contains a root directory owned by user 1000 and group 1000. The ownership of a mounted file system’s root directory becomes the ownership of the mount point.

Stephen Kitt
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    I suppose this is because I created the partition using `gnome-disks` as unprivileged user. But there is nothing in that GUI informing me about it. – Jérôme May 28 '18 at 08:22
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    @Jérôme The owner of the root of a file system can be changed with `chown` just like any other directory. – kasperd May 28 '18 at 10:21
  • OK @kasperd. I was just surprised it was `jerome` and not `root` in the first place since I thought I did everything as `root`. – Jérôme May 28 '18 at 10:29