~/.gconf problem

[Tom H]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 10:17 AM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 23 July 2014 06:40:35 Chris Green did opine
> And Gene did reply:
>> On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 04:29:53AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> > Greetings all;
>> >
>> > Can someone tell be what to do with /home/me/.gconf?
>> >
>> > According to an ls -la:
>> > drw-r-xr-x  4 gene gene   4096 2014-07-22 12:48 .gconf
>> >
>> > I own the thing, and I ought to be able to do whatever I want with
>> > it, including copying a tree from a machine that gedit works on, to
>> > a machine it won't work on.
>>
>> Except that you don't have 'x' permission which will prevent you
>> cd'ing to it.  To be able to enter a directory you need 'x' permission.
>>
>> Standard, let everyone see but only I can write, permission is:-
>>
>> drwxr-xr-x  4 gene gene   4096 2014-07-22 12:48 .gconf
>>
>> 0755
> And I find, on a machine where it all Just Works(TM)
> drwsrwsrwx  4 gene gene   4096 2014-07-22 12:48 .gconf
>
> "s"? don't have a clue what that tells me.  Don't recall ever noticing
> that before. ???  Man page for ls doesn't discuss it.  And I have yet to
> find a translation table that deciphers the 4 octal bytes normally used to
> set this stuff.  I have only been using linux since 1998, seems like I
> should have stumbled onto it somewhere in 16 years.

"s" means that both the setuid bit and the execute bit are set:

$ touch GENE

$ chmod 4700 GENE

$ ll
total 0
-rws------ 1 th th 0 2014-07-23 14:09 GENE*

$ chmod 4600 GENE

$ ll
total 0
-rwS------ 1 th th 0 2014-07-23 14:09 GENE

And by the way:

$ ll -d /home/th/.gconf
drwx------ 4 th th 4.0K 2014-07-22 20:41 /home/th/.gconf/