Hi,

I am getting permission denied errors for most of commands in my box. what could be the possible reasons ?

joe

You need to provide more info, like distro that you use.

distro is rhel5 64 bit.
this happens during the end of installation. Well it's not a typical rhel5 installation. The installation has a lot of customizations.
The issue is worse for the user root. If I create another user while the installation is in progress & before the commands start failing, then that user can run a lot more commands than root can. Many folder become inaccessible after this, for root as well other user. selinux could be one reason, but how do i confirm this ? also why is it that root cannot run commands, but other user can. I checked .bashrc, .bash_profile, etc for root, but everything looks perfect.

try this

Only SELinux can prohibit the root privilege. So try to disable the selinux temporarily using the command
setsebool 0

If it works permanently disable the selinux from the file /etc/selinux/config

nope i thought it was an selinux issue, but it doesn't work just by disabling selinux.
But the strange part is that everything works fine once u reboot the box even with selinux in enforcing mode.

If these customizations are the result of a modified installer medium or pulling in modifications from a non-RHEL repo or modifications made otherwise during the installation then this is not a Linux Security problem and neither a RHEL one.

Also note that there is a difference between talking about errors:
or saying:
and proper problem analysis.

Talking about errors is not the same as listing commands you ran (if any), listing modifications and posting other terminal stdout / stderr / dmesg / installer log excerpts and other diagnostics. Without that there can only be unfounded speculation, making troubleshooting less efficient.

*I'm moving this thread to the Linux General forum as it seems more appropriate there.