Das Werkstatt

[PROBLEM]
I've been using ntfs-3g for quite a while without problems, except for an annoying error message that appeared for every file created on an NTFS partition:

Could not change permissions for ...

The file is created without problems, but applications receive an error as feedback, thus leading to false (and annoying) warnings (e.g extracting files with Ark claims that the files are broken).


[SOLUTION]
The error is caused by the system trying to modify ownership/access rights for the created file according to the umask/gid options in /etc/fstab.

My erroneous fstab line looked like this: NTFS can't handle unix-like permissions anyway, so it's fine to disable them.

Changing the mount options to the ones below makes the error message go away, because the system's not doing any chown/chmod anymore:
[Additional Information]
Sometimes you see people mounting ntfs partitions with "silent" as option. According to "man ntfs-3g", this does the following:

Do nothing on chmod and chown operations, but do not return error. This option is on by default

So if you mount it with "defaults", silent is on automatically.

Thanks to the following forum threads:
Could not change permissions for... (mybroadband.co.za)
Moving files and permissions (ubuntuforums.org)