I'm using fedora core 5 and have a problem I can't seem to solve. I recently got files from someone's mp3-player and put them on my hard-disk somewhere in my home directory. Now when I try to move the directories taken from the player from one directory to another or try to change names, I get a "permission denied". I tried chmod and chmod as root, my user is both owner and group for the file. When I try ls -l the directories show up in blue letters marked green. (I am using bash) I don't know exactly what this means, but I guess this means they're sort of read-only. Can anyone help in changing this? Many thanks.

I don't know what you mean "marked green." Blue is the normal color for directories. When you copy files from CDs, they normally do not have the write bits set because a CD is read only. But you should be able to change this with chmod.

Perhaps you could post the long (using -l) directory listing of one of the problematic files as well as the directory it is in? (To list just the directory instead of its contents, add the -d option.)

Also try the commands:

lsattr
lsattr -d

Use the first form for files and the second form for directories.

EDIT: Oops. I just noticed you said MP3 player instead of CD! But still do report back the result of the long directory listing and lsattr.

I am most terribly sorry to have taken up your time like this... I just found out I mistook "owner" en "other" and gave everyone but myself writing permissions to the dirs. Excuse me.

You would have done well with the VMS operating system where "o" was "owner" and "w" was "world (IIRC). " I've made the same mistake you did. I try to tell myself it's because I did use VMS a long time ago. Still, the *nix usage seems a little strange to me -- IIRC, with VMS if world had permission, that included the user. Ditto for group if the user was in that group. But not so in *nix.