One of my favorite things about Linux is also the most annoying - file system permissions. In production machines and web servers I love how everything is so secure and locked down - but on development machines it really slows me down. I'll give one example out of the many that I discover weekly.

Like most people, I dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows so I can continue using the Adobe CS4 suite. I often design web themes and other things while I'm still using windows. Later I'll boot into Ubuntu to take the themes and write the backend PHP for them. After mounting the windows C: drive partition I can copy the template files over so I can begin editing them.

However, thanks to Linux desire to protect me I find that after coping the files I end up with a totally locked set of files where even I don't have read-write permissions. So after carful consideration about the tremendous risks that the HTML files pose to me - I chmod them so that I and apache can begin using them.

Now given, the chmod process isn't that hard - but after you chmod enough files per day you get sick of doing it. I'm constantly creating, fetch, editing, and removing files from my user, git repos, php, or other random processes. This is a personal development machine after all. Everything changes on a day by day basis.

So my question is, how can I get linux to relax about what I'm doing with my HTML/JS/PHP/TXT/SQL/etc. files so that I can work faster without constantly stopping to chmod things?

I pinky-promise I won't hack into my account with an HTML file. ;)