[CoLoCo] permission question

[Scott Scriven]

* Jim Hutchinson <jim at ubuntu-rocks.org> wrote:
> They say a little knowledge is dangerous.
> ...
> I tried to "fix" it by chmod-ing to 655

I'd suggest a couple things, until you're more familiar with how 
permissions work:

  - Avoid numeric permissions.  Instead, use the more 
    human-friendly representations, such as "g+w" to add group 
    write access, or "a-x" to remove execute access from all.  
    This looks like "chmod g+w myfile".

  - Avoid recursive permissions.  They tend to cause more changes 
    than necessary.  Doing a recursive chmod on /home/user is 
    almost guaranteed to break things.

Also, if you don't already, be sure to always include "-l" when 
you run ls.  Many users do this by creating an alias in 
~/.bashrc:

  alias ll='/bin/ls -alF --color=auto'

Then, run "ll" instead of "ls".

> sudo chmod -R 644 /home/user

You might want to read up on the effect of permissions on 
directories, particularly the "execute" bit.  In short, +r allows 
you to list the files in a directory, but not access those files.  
The +x bit lets you access the files, but not list them.

Mode 644 means -rw-r--r--, so no +x.  And no access.


-- Scott