Shell script getting 'permission denied' despite using umask 000 before command

Question

I have a shell script (build.sh) that ends by attempting to copy some files into a new directory. However it says:

mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/files/ondisk/shared//comp/auto/bleeding-1169-b28d31a’: Permission denied

when running the script.

The command is:

( umask 000; mkdir -p "${BASE}/${TARGET}" ) || exit -1
( umask 000; cp -r ${STORE} "${BASE}/${TARGET}" ) || exit -1

Does umask 000 not ensure that I am able to write to this location?

Answer 1

That double-slash in the pathname looks odd. Perhaps you have no permission to write the ${BASE}, which might be /files/ondisk/shared. The umask value is irrelevant, because it only affects the permissions of the directories and files which mkdir and cp create — not the permissions of the existing directory into which you are copying.