How can I change the umask for one command only?

Question

How can I interactively execute a command in Linux (zsh, if it matters) with a different umask from the default, for one command only? Perhaps a combination of commands combined in a single line? The new umask should apply only to that command and return to its default value for the next command entered.

Ideally the command would be agnostic to the default umask in force before its entered (in other words, the default umask doesn't have to specified).

Answer 1

Start a subshell:

(umask 22 && cmd)

Then the new umask will only alter that subshell.

Note that zsh executes the last command of the subshell in the subshell process instead of forking another one, which means that if that command is external, you're not even wasting a process, it's just that the fork is done earlier (so the umask is done in the child process that will later execute your command).

Answer 2

You could wrap it in a shell script. umask inherits to all child processes.

cmd.sh:

umask 0022
cmd