Hi All,

I'm not sure what is going on here. I don't think it is my distro necessarily, I'm running Ubuntu 7.04. As my user (we'll say james) I created a directory in /home called /home/common. This directory is owned by james and is in the group users. Both user james and ann are default members of users.

I ran the command 'sudo chmod -R 660' for the results of giving the owner and group members read and write permission and nothing to others.

Well, as my user, james, I tried to change to the common directory and I get access denied??? I do not understand. I even double checked that I was a member of users and I am. It is the default group!

Can someone shed some light on this please.

Thanks

I believe you need to give "execute" permissions to traverse/enter a directory. That may not be the correct terminology, but give both the owner and group execute permission on the directory:
You'll need to do that for any subdirectories inside /home/common as well. The following command will do that:
Also, if you added or changed any user's group or initial group, I strongly recommend you log out completely of any terminals or GUI environment that the modified user(s) are currently logged into. That will make sure the modifications are "flushed" through the system so to speak.

You might also be interested in setting the "sticky bit" for the directory. Do a Google search on it for information, but the basic idea is this: a directory with the sticky bit set allows users to create files in a shared directory, but only the file's creator can delete the file. Like I said, you mgiht be interested in that... maybe not. Thought I'd throw it out there.

Exactly: 660 is read-write permissions only:

4=read
2=write
1=execute

You do need the execute permissions.

The numbers add up, so 6= 4 (read) + 2(write). If you also need execute permissions, add 1. Result: chmod -R 770.

Which is just another way of doing what Dark Helmet suggested.