: locked out of home directory??

[Derek Broughton]

Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:

> On Thu, 25 Oct 2007, matt.price at utoronto.ca
> wrote:
> 
>> hi folks,
>>
>> i've run into a weird problem -- i can't access the home directory of my
>> main
>> user on a system running ubuntu gutsy.  xsession fails with a
>> less-than-ten-seconds error, and when i log in at the console i get the
>> message:
...
>>
>> but if i ls -ld /home/matt it shows
>>
>> drw-r--r-- matt matt   /home/matt
>>
>> doesn't that seem bizarre? 
> 
> chmod u+x /home/matt
 
LOL.  I couldn't see the forest for the trees.  I was thinking he might need
to do the same to /home - not noticing that he had no X permissions
on /home/matt.

Note, the default for home directories is 'drwxr-xr-x'.  The g+x permission
is not a big deal, but you may (or not) want to permit world execute - it
doesn't permit users to read a directory, but it lets them traverse to it,
which is necessary if you _do_ want to allow others to read any particular
subdirectory.
-- 
derek