I have a subdirectory, specifically containing the contents of a system backup I made quite a while ago. After I installed Jessie, I went to this subdirectory to restore the applications whose data I had backed up there. It was not a problem.

This afternoon, I went back to that subdirectory to check on a setting, and I was denied permission to enter it. I could get in as root, but I should have been able to get in under my account name, just as I had done before.

I went into a root shell, and issued a "chown -Rc <username>:<group>" command to change everything there to my ownership. The results of this command were that no changes were made. All the files and directories were already listed as belonging to <username>:<group>.

When I went back out to my normal console command line, I was still told that I could not enter that subdirectory because "permission denied".

Does anyone have any idea what is going on here, and how to rectify the situation?

Thank you in advance!


bruceam

What are the permissions and ownership on the directory itself.

For example, if the directory is /home/bruce/somedirectory...

astrogeek,
The permissions of the directory are as they should be <myusername>:<mygroup>, just like the other directories that I can get into without having to invoke a root shell.

Thank you for your rapid reply!

bruceam

Well, that is the ownerships, but we still don't know the permissions. What is the output of ls -ld somedirectory/?

astrogeek,
Your post was more helpful than I first realized. I was looking at the print out of the "ls -ld" command when I noticed that all the other directories in this location (THAT I COULD GET INTO) had their "Execute" flag set. In other words, the permissions/mode for the directory I was having problems with were

'drw-r--r-- n <myusername> <mygroup> etc...'

while the other directories, which I could access, had the following permissions:

'drwxr--r-- n <myusername> <mygroup> etc...'

I didn't realize that a subdirectory had to be "executable". When I changed the permissions of the problem subdirectory, everything began to work just as it should!

astrogeek - THANKS AGAIN!!!!

bruceam

Yes, the "execute" bit must be set for you to be able to enter a directory.

To be more precise, you cannot execute a directory, so the bit has a different meaning in directory context - "traversal" or "cross". It means that a user can traverse, or cross the directory boundary. But it is still "x" and everyone still calls it "execute".

Now you know! Glad that helped!