Simple Basic UNIX Permission Denied

[problem]

You are quite happily editing away, then you come to save … oh dear, permission denied.

Either the file is set to readable, or it is owned by another user.

But you have write permission to the directory, either by user or group!

[/problem]

[solution]

If it is just a simple case of the file being unwritable and you own it, if in vi following the first example.

If you are not the owner, write the file to /tmp. Then follow the second example.

[/solution]

[example]

Allow write permission to a file you are currently vi editing – but the file is not writable.

:!chmod u+w %

If you are not the owner, no need to worry, even without root we can change the owner if you have write access to the directory! 🙂

:!zsh mv -i your_filename /tmp/your_filename.mv cp -i /tmp/your_filename.mv your_filename

Obviously if not in vi, you’ll need to break out to a shell using the mechanism in your editor. Also you may not have zsh, so ksh – bash, etc will do.

I tend to do all this on the command line, with a semi-colon between the mv and cp – so I can use command line expansion (the move has not happened yet!).

mv -i thefile[tab] /tmp/thefileXXXX;cp -i /tmp/thefileXXXX . [return]

[/example]

[reference]

[tags]Unix permission denied, chown owner without root, Unix Coding School[/tags]