I have a weird little problem, the solution of which is eluding me.

I have a database on my office machine that is accessed by logging in as a special user. The user's default 'shell' is the database program and therefore is all the user sees upon login. Each year I update the program and database ... this year in March. Everything was ok then but not now.

When I log in as user "csd" I get:

bash: /usr/src/cambridge/.bashrc: Permission denied

This is csd's home folder. The permissions for the folder are:

drwxr-xr-x 18 csd users 4096 Mar 7 14:39 cambridge/

When I temporarily change csd's shell to bash I find that I cannot cd to this folder. Why would that be if csd owns it? BTW, folder cambridge/ is in /usr/src (because it's located on a large drive). There have been no such problems in the past. Everything was working in March.

If I change csd's home folder to /home/csd but leave the 'shell' program in cambridge/bin it still doesn't work. If I copy the entire cambridge/ folder to /home/csd I can then begin to run the program ... but I don't want to do that. I'd rather leave it on the large drive. There are other problems associated with moving it as well.

Colour me puzzled.

And what is the permissions of .bashrc ?

There's no .bashrc file .. that's part of the mystery.

Please post the output of the command What happens when you log in as root first, issue the command "su csd", and then attempt to cd into /usr/src/cambridge?

Here's the output of "grep csd /etc/passwd":

csd:x:1035:0:,,,:/usr/src/cambridge:/bin/bash

Logging in as root and then su'ing to csd gives:

bash: /usr/src/cambridge/.bashrc: Permission denied

What I don't understand is that I've set the permissions of /usr/src/cambridge so that csd owns it and all of it's sub-directories. This approach has worked for years but seems to have suddenly changed.

Found what was causing the problem!!

/usr/src had permissions 700 ... only root could cd there. Everything is good now. Thanks for the replies.