Skip to content
    • Welcome to the Linux Foundation Forum!

    [Lab 5.1 Group Management] Couldn't create file under "somedir": Permission denied

    Posts: 9
    edited April 2024 in LFS207 Class Forum

    Following the instructions in the document for Lab 5.1 where you have to create a file as a user belonging to a group inside a directory placed under another user's home directory, I only kept getting this error:

    1. 📦[bullwinkle@linux-sysadmin-course ~]$ touch /home/rocky/somedir/somefile
    2. touch: cannot touch '/home/rocky/somedir/somefile': Permission denied

    I figured out later that the outputs of ls -l weren't the same for the systems I tried it on (Fedora 38, openSUSE Tumbleweed 20240310, Debian 11), e.g. my Fedora distrobox:

    1. 📦[rocky@linux-sysadmin-course ~]$ ls -l
    2. total 4
    3. drwxr-xr-x 2 rocky bosses 4096 Mar 13 17:22 somedir

    Compared to the walkthrough provided:

    1. $ ls -l
    2. total 16
    3. -rw-r--r-- 1 rocky rocky 8980 Oct 4 2013 examples.desktop
    4. drwxrwxr-x 2 rocky bosses 4096 Oct 30 09:53 somedir

    i.e. the write permissions weren't granted on the directory for me, but they were (by default?) in the example.

    I don't know if this was intended or not, but I felt like I should have made a post about this.

    Welcome!

    It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.
    Sign In

    Comments

    • Posts: 1,268

      Hi @fabv , what is the distro and version that didn't work for you? I can try to reproduce the issue.

      Regards,
      Luis.

    • Posts: 9
      edited April 2024

      Hi! The details are in my post already:

      the systems I tried it on (Fedora 38, openSUSE Tumbleweed 20240310, Debian 11)

      I can provide more details if needed, the Fedora container I used for my own example has this for its /etc/os-release:

      1. $ cat /etc/os-release
      2. NAME="Fedora Linux"
      3. VERSION="38 (Container Image)"
      4. ID=fedora
      5. VERSION_ID=38
      6. VERSION_CODENAME=""
      7. PLATFORM_ID="platform:f38"
      8. PRETTY_NAME="Fedora Linux 38 (Container Image)"
      9. ANSI_COLOR="0;38;2;60;110;180"
      10. LOGO=fedora-logo-icon
      11. CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:fedoraproject:fedora:38"
      12. DEFAULT_HOSTNAME="fedora"
      13. HOME_URL="https://fedoraproject.org/"
      14. DOCUMENTATION_URL="https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f38/system-administrators-guide/"
      15. SUPPORT_URL="https://ask.fedoraproject.org/"
      16. BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/"
      17. REDHAT_BUGZILLA_PRODUCT="Fedora"
      18. REDHAT_BUGZILLA_PRODUCT_VERSION=38
      19. REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT="Fedora"
      20. REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT_VERSION=38
      21. SUPPORT_END=2024-05-14
      22. VARIANT="Container Image"
      23. VARIANT_ID=container
    • Posts: 9

      To add, after reading the umask lesson and seeing the "Demo: umask" video, I noticed that it does look like at the time of writing them, those systems had a default umask of 0002 instead of the current 0022 I get on my systems.
      I don't know where to look to say when this change could have been implemented.

    • Posts: 1,268

      Hi @fabv ,

      I tested it on Fedora 38 and I was able to reproduce the issue. So the workaround is the following:

      1.- Move or copy the test to /tmp/ , so in some distros will be easier to avoid specific setups about the user directories.

      I used 'cp -Rpv somedir/ /tmp/' in order to preserve the permissions on the directory.

      2.- You need to give write permissions over somedir/ directory for the bosses group, so that way the bullwinkle user will be able to write on it.

      I did that as rocky user and:

      chmod 771 /tmp/somedir/

      And that was enough.

      Regards,
      Luis.

    • Posts: 9

      Thanks for confirming and for providing another solution!

      Personally, I had solved that by simply giving write permissions on the directory to the group:

      1. chmod g+x somedir
    • Posts: 1,268

      Hi @fabv,

      Yeah, that works. It's similar to step 2 I put above.

      Regards,
      Luis.

    Welcome!

    It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.
    Sign In

    Welcome!

    It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.
    Sign In

    Quick Links

    Categories

    Upcoming Training