Yep... it's what Pingswept would have told you to do next after seeing that output...
I don't know how much about linux permissions you know, but that string at the start of the output (rw-rw-rw-) are the modes of the file...
it goes: UUUGGGEEE (U=user, G=group, E=everyone).
and the modes are rwx (read, write, execute).
so that file was read/write for user root, read/write for group root, and read/write for everyone else as well...
the chmod (change mode) +x (add execute) adds the execute bit to the file...
so it wasn't an access permission root was having it was an execute problem - the file was not set to be allowed to be executed.
the three permissions (rwx) can be thought of as three 'bits'... ie 210... (so the binary value of each one is 2 raised to the power of one of those numbers)... ie: 4,2,1...
so say you had just wanted to let root execute that... then you could have said:
chmod 766 <filename>... ie the USER permission becomes 7 (= 4 + 2 + 1, ie r + w + x), and the GROUP permission becomes 6 ( = 4 + 2) (ie r + w ) and the same for everyone else.
That's how you set the exact permissions you want on something.
and if you wanted a small set of people to access something, you could do something like:
create a group called 'audio' (groupadd audio), then change the group of the file to 'audio'
(eg chown root:audio /dev/dsp ) and then add the users you want to allow access to to that group (eg usermod -G audio,<other groups> <username>) - you have to find out what groups you are currently a member of first tho (groups <username>) so you can add them to the list, else it will remove you from those groups.
I have actually found it useful to mount drives (eg NTFS drives) with the GID option (ie the group id - which you can find by doing 'grep <group name> /etc/groups') so that the drive becomes owned by that group, and I make myself a member of that group. so that whenever the drive is mounted (eg automatically at boot) I automatically have access to it.
So yeah - useful stuff really
by the way - don't go off and actually try any of these examples unless you need to... and also unless you understand how those binary group permissions are worked out, stick to the chmod +/-x +/-r +/-w etc... I have heard some people go psycho about so called newbies using the binary method - personally I can't see any reason why they shouldn't...
Permission Denied when logged in as root?
