I agree, the default home directory permissions work against the system owner rather than helping.

This is the kind of configuration that I would have expected RMS to have been in favor of in the 1970s at MIT -

https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/richard-stallman-13421.php

In 2021, defaulting to mode 755 for home directories is an anachronism at best. Even in the 1990s, home directories on shell accounts were typically set to mode 711 (go+x to allow httpd into ~/public_html)

Peter

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