I am fairly new to the linux scene, and I am currently using Gentoo Linux. How exactly do I go about setting a global default umask value to set 777 permissions on a particular folder and its contents?
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You don't. That's not how umask works. Instead, it sets default permissions for *all* files saved by a particular account (userid).
If you want to make this change for all userids (or all except root), do it in some file that sets the environment globally. For the bash shell, this is probably /etc/profile (that's the standard one, and I imagine Gentoo follows the standard). For example, my /etc/profile file contains this line:
umask 022
A umask is the (octal) inverse of permissions, so this sets the default permissions to 755. For a default of 777, set the umask to 000.
If you want to make the change for specific accounts (userids), put a line to reset the umash in that account's individual configuration file. This varies in name a bitr more than systemwide files, but ones to look for are (in the account's home directory) .profile, .bash_profile, or .bashrc (use "ls -a" to display filenames that begin with a .).
I don't know of a way to set default permissions for a specific directory only, which is why I didn't discourage Eve from taking the approach she described for her problem. Perhaps someone else does, though ... we'll have to wait and see.
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