Initially, the file protection mask is set from the current process's default file protection. This is done when the C main program starts up or when DECC$CRTL_INIT (or VAXC$CRTL_INIT) is called. You can change this for all files created by your program by calling umask or you can use chmod to change the file protection on individual files. The file protection of a file created by open or creat is the bitwise AND of the open and creat mode argument with the complement of the value passed to umask on the previous call. NOTE The way to create files with OpenVMS RMS default protections using the UNIX system-call functions umask, mkdir, creat, and open is to call mkdir, creat, and open with a file- protection mode argument of 0777 in a program that never specifically calls umask. These default protections include correctly establishing protections based on ACLs, previous versions of files, and so on. In programs that do vfork/exec calls, the new process image inherits whether umask has ever been called or not from the calling process image. The umask setting and whether the umask function has ever been called are both inherited attributes.