Thanks Jaap! I like your /dropbox setup! Still, as you say, this setup lets users their umask to give everyone else (or nobody else) rwx. So if Albert has his umask set to rwxrwxrwx, he could drop a file in my drop box, and somebody else could revise the file, right?  (I think the sticky bit protects from having someone else delete or move the file). So I can't say "if you put a file in my drop box, it will be safe from edits by others."  Of course I can say "if you put a file in my drop box, if you set the file permissions to be safe from others (rwx------) , it will stay safe from others", which is reasonable.  And I could always schedule a job to reset the permissions (since I would own the file). THanks again for your detailed explanations and links.  These came at a timely moment for me, and led to much reading this morning. ... View more