I'm trying to set a directory so that members of a certain group can write to it, so I can add myself to the group and write to it without either chowning the directory to myself or making it world-writable. So why doesn't this work?


rps@sausage:/usr/local/etc$ ls -lh
total 0
drwxr-sr-x 2 root staff 80 May 24 18:05 kahua
rps@sausage:/usr/local/etc$ groups rps
rps : rps cdrom audio kahua
rps@sausage:/usr/local/etc$ sudo chgrp kahua kahua
rps@sausage:/usr/local/etc$ touch kahua/foo
touch: cannot touch `kahua/foo': Permission denied
rps@sausage:/usr/local/etc$ ls -lh
total 0
drwxr-sr-x 2 root kahua 80 May 24 18:05 kahua
rps@sausage:/usr/local/etc$

Hi,

your directory kahua is not writable by people in the group. It is only writable by the root.

type to make it writable also by people in the group kahua.

That will make the directory writable by people in group kahua, but files created will not be automatically owned by group kahua.

Try either
to add group write permission or
to specify all permissions at once

Groetjes,

Kees-Jan

What is this 2 that you are adding before the 775? What does it do?
I like the name of your distribution "BeatrIX". No need to specify that you are from the Netherlands :-)

Hi,

The two specifies the directory to be "set group id". For directories, this means that anything created in that directory will have the same group as the parent directory.

The directory of the original poster had already its set-group-id bit set (permissions read drwxr-sr-x, note the s), and your command would have removed that.

Actually, BeatrIX is created by someone from the Czech republic, who named it after his cat, which, in turn, is named after our queen. So the relation between the distribution and the country is somewhat accidental. Nevertheless, it is a nice distribution :-)

Groetjes,

Kees-Jan