Subject: Re: bug#9788: chown gets permission denied

From: "Alan Curry" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2011 18:36:53 -0500 (GMT+5)

Richard Woolley writes:
> 
> When trying to change ownership of the files in a directory, I mistakenly h=
> ad the settings wrong in the command, so I got the following
> ls -l
> total 16
> drw-rw-r--  4  user proj1 4096 Sep 28 14:23 doc/
> drw-rw-r-- 24 user proj1 4096 Sep 28 14:27 modules/
> drw-rw-r--  3 user proj1 4096 Sep 28 14:23 project/

Your first problem is that you've got some directories here with read
permission but no x permission. In that situation, this happens:

> ls -l project
> total 0
> ?--------- ? ? ? ?            ? compile.conf
> ?--------- ? ? ? ?            ? myproject.conf
> ?--------- ? ? ? ?            ? novas_fli.so

ls can read the directory, getting the filenames, but the lack of x
permission prevents it from getting any other information.

First chmod u+x doc modules project, then see what you get from ls -l on
them.

-- 
Alan Curry