Linux – ‘Permission denied’ to a file I own

filesystemslinuxpermissions

My user, bob, can't access files that he (theoretically owns). I'm running Fedora Core 8. It probably easier to shown than tell:

> ls -al .
total 32
drwxrwxr-x 7 bob bob 4096 May 18 14:33 .
drwxrwxr-x 4 bob bob 4096 May 12 15:44 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 bob bob 4096 June 1 14:22 log

> cd ./log
-bash: cd: log/: Permission denied

> ls -al ./log
ls: cannot access log/..: Permission denied
ls: cannot access log/the.log: Permission denied
ls: cannot access log/.: Permission denied
total 0
d????????? ? ? ? ?            ? .
d????????? ? ? ? ?            ? ..
-????????? ? ? ? ?            ? the.log

> sudo ls -al ./log
drw-rw-r-- 3 bob bob      4096 Jun  2 04:11 .
drwxrwxr-x 7 bob bob      4096 May 18 14:33 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 bob bob         0 Jun  1 04:12 the.log

The ls -al stands out as very odd. It will list the files that I don't have permissions to see, but not show me the permissions?

So the questions are, what would cause this? And what can I do to repair it?

Best Answer

> sudo ls -al ./log
...
drw-rw-r-- 3 bob bob      4096 Jun  2 04:11 .

It doesn't look like Bob has execute permissions for ./log, so he can't cd to it.

But 

> ls -al .
...
drwxr-xr-x 2 bob bob 4096 June 1 14:22 log

shows that he does. But it doesn't look like they are pointing to the same file (different permissions, different modtime).

Try sudo ls -ail ./log and ls -ail to see if the inode is the same.

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