umask are the default permissions that are applied when a file or directory are created. To see this in action simply just "touch filename" or "mkdir somedir" and you'll see what default permissions are applied.
The first thing Ialways tell people you should know is to NEVER change the defaults unless you are making them more restrictive. But they work well and if you change the defaults you could end up creating a file without permission to read........
We've all done this at some point, you work on the wrong shell window and this was my first time making this mistake but I deleted a partition table in fdisk, recreated it and saved it with "wq" and even ran partprobe! If you haven't rebooted yet then you can still recover your partition table, otherwise you're in big trouble.
Fortunately since it was a live system and in use the kernel still had to use the old table like below:........