Hi All,

File permissions are really getting annoying. I have installed tomcat4 and it contains a lot of logs in the /var/tomcat4/logs directory.

I also have 4 users who I want to be able to see these logs with TAIL and MORE. However, I do not want them to have root access to the system, only to these logs.

The logs belong to user and group TOMCAT4. They are also created only with owner read/write which is crap.

I tried changing the log file perms to group read/write and added my users to the TOMCAT4 group. This did not work. In fact for some reason chmod 777 does not work either. I have even tried setting /var/ and /var/tomcat4 and /var/tomcat4/logs permissions.

Why is this so difficult to do - i thought linux was good at this stuff grrr

What does is mean when you say 'this did not work'? The chmod failed / The users still weren't able to access the files?

If the machine doesn't behave the way you intended, it is only because the your intentions weren't communicated properly to the machine.


I would've chosen the sudo approach if I cant change the permissions on the freshly created logfiles automatically throug some tomcat conf option. With tail and rvim ( instead of more/less, so they cant open a root shell from it or suspend it and spawn a root shell ), but you dont necessarily need to go that route since this involves only file-read permissions and when it comes to that, there is nothing that can't be achieved - if know what you're doing.

Go ahead and post your directory listing ( ls -al /var/tomcat4 ) and id <username> and whoever sees it first should be able to help you out.