I have an ubuntu server. I created a simple index.html file using touch. and tried to use nano and it turns out the permission is denied. Why is this? If I just made the file on the server why wouldn't I have write access in the first place? My second question is if I wanted to change the permissions to the number format 644 (is that what a html file on the server should be set to?) how do I view what it currently is how do I convert -rw-rw-r-- to the numeral format? I want to view -ls -l with the numeral permissions format rather then -rw-rw-r--. The index.html file is running on the server alright.
thomas@vannevar:~/public/example.org/public$ touch index.html
thomas@vannevar:~/public/example.org/public$ ls
index.html
thomas@vannevar:~/public/example.org/public$ nano index.html
Error reading /home/thomas/.nano_history: Permission denied
Press Enter to continue starting nano.
thomas@vannevar:~/public/example.org/public$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-rw-r-- 1 thomas thomas 0 May 17 13:57 index.html
thomas@vannevar:~/public/example.org/public$
THIS WORKS
Best Answer
Your problem is reading nano's history file (.nano_history), as indicated very clearly in this massively whitespaced error line:
This is opened prior to nano opening your file (which works fine because 644 is okay for this)
Looks like your home folder/.nano_history's permissions might be set too tight.
Following your comment:
-rw------- 1 root root 111 May 17 14:13 /home/thomas/.nano_historyAs you can see only root's user has read and write permissions, no one else.
You want to do
sudo chown thomas:thomas ~/.nano_historyto fix this issue.