chmod doesn't work (says it does, but doesn't)

[nc_jed]

What gives?

blake@servey486:/media/usb$ sudo chmod -v 777 *
mode of `Chandler' changed to 0777 (rwxrwxrwx)
mode of `Gardner' changed to 0777 (rwxrwxrwx)
blake@servey486:/media/usb$ ls -al
total 100
drwxr-xr-x  4 root root 32768 2011-03-12 09:26 .
drwxr-xr-x 12 root root  4096 2011-02-04 18:02 ..
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 32768 2011-03-12 09:26 Chandler
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 32768 2011-03-12 09:26 Gardner
blake@servey486:/media/usb$

If it makes a difference, this is a vfat USB drive on a headless ubuntu server (10.10).

-NC_jed

[vanadium]

You know that the vfat file system does not support Linux permissions? Like you, I would indeed expect an error message, though.

[jerome1232]

File permissions for MS filesystems are set for the entire drive at mount time, there is some good info about in in this post somewhere http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=283131

edit: I remember something about chmod can be configured to either give errors or not when attempting on ms filesystems.... I'm on a windows machine atm so can't check.

[nc_jed]

File permissions for MS filesystems are set for the entire drive at mount time, there is some good info about in in this post somewhere http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=283131

edit: I remember something about chmod can be configured to either give errors or not when attempting on ms filesystems.... I'm on a windows machine atm so can't check.

Thanks for the feedback, both of you. In the process of trying to figure out this issue, I lost sight in the fact that I'm setting this up as a network SAMBA share for a couple of Windows clients, so I suppose it's a moot point. For my Linux accesses, I can just Sudo it. Thanks for the feedback, though!

- Jed