I have a calibre ebook reader library on a flash drive that I share between two computers. It is generally mounted on my desktop, and then linked via sshfs to my laptop. I rebuilt the calibre directory after an error, and found that when listing the directories within the library directory, I had files with the following info (via 'ls -o')


drwxrwxrwx 1 jebradl 4096 Oct 7 18:39 Alpha, A.
drwxrwxrwx 1 jebradl 4096 Oct 13 00:30 Bravo, B.
d-wxr---wx 1 50729570 12850292 Jan 3 1945 Charlie, C.
drwxrwxr-x 1 jebradl 4096 Nov 15 21:47 Delta, D.
drws--x--x 1 335594424 743248642 Sep 7 04:06 Echo, E.


I am using Ubuntu 12.04. I have tried 'sudo chmod 755 directory' (I am aware that it's a directory and wouldn't be executable) to change the read/write attributes to directories 'Charlie, C.' and 'Echo, E.', and I have tried 'sudo chown jebradl directory' to change the ownership, and I have even tried 'sudo rm -rf directory' to delete the directory, all without any success. The other directories within the library directory are read and writable. How do I change these?

There are various possibilities:

1. partition has gone read-only
2. check SELinux (ls -lZ)
3. check acls (getfacl *)
4. check attributes (lsattr * : its very unlikely to be this one)

l recently had a similar issue with my ~/.ssh directory contents after copying from my 3T USB backup drive.

I could copy the directory just fine and all the perms were set until I used an alias that used one of the ssh keys in that directory.

Another 4 rounds of Terminal >
cp /run/media/jj/Keepers/.ssh/* to my /home/jj/ directory.

Perms are good and all is well, until I used an alias. Then I'd have ????? all over the place in ~/.ssh/
Drove me crazy. I can't even work like this (SysAdmin).

So what I would up doing (and it has worked flawlessly since) is use Thunar to copy the directory back graphically.
It didn't make sense then, nor makes sense now (still).
I use rsync to copy my entire /home/jj/ directory to the Drive.

No amount of any keyboard/terminal commands would resolve the issue for good.

Thunar did the trick.

Good Luck.

I'm not sure what you are describing by 'graphically' copying a directory with Thunar. Since I use xfce4 as my desktop, Thunar is installed, but I generally use Nautilus when I want to use a file manager. I generally do most file management from the command line.
The comments about graphically copying are irrelivant at the present time, though, because attempts to open the Library directory yield the following message:

Error when getting information for file '/mnt/sdb2/FlashLibrary/rob': Input/output error.

I can go into the directory in a console, though. I have another 32Gb flash drive, so I'm going to copy the files that I can from the command line, and then I'll go from there.

added line- Actually, I thought that I had another 32Gb flash drive. It came off my keychain somewhere, and who knows where that was. I'm very diskspace constrained at the moment. I'll have to try a different approach (at least until the 64Gb flash drive that I just ordered arrives.)