How do I auto mount a USB drive that all users can write to?

Solution 1:

You can do a chmod after you mounted the partition, but that wouldn't be persistent accross reboots.

You should try this fstab line:

/dev/sda1   /media/josiah    vfat    user,umask=0000   0   0

Or this mount options:

mount -t vfat -ouser,umask=0000 /dev/sda1 /media/josiah

That will make the mounted partition world readable and writable.

If you need a less permissive setup, you should create a new group and mount as follows:

mount -t vfat -ouser,gid=1010,umask=0007 /dev/sda1 /media/josiah

It assumes your new group's gid is 1010. All users that need access to the mountpoint will need to be added to the new group.

Solution 2:

Edit the permissions for the mount directory.

In your case, chmod 777 /media/josiah ought to do the trick quite nicely.

Solution 3:

The "user" option just let the user mount the device, it has no relation to access rights for the file.

As in gnp answer, see "uid"/"gid" and "umask" option.