[Tfug] Bizarre permissions problem

[John Gruenenfelder]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 04:49:32PM -0700, Jim March wrote:
>   I could try without X yeah but...I don't think that's it.
>   See, what scares me is that the directory isn't visible at all when I
>   "sudo nautilus".  That tells me that the root account (which is there
>   in Ubuntu but buried) can't see the directory at all.  Root has no
>   permissions to it for READ let alone write.
>   So...if root can't read or write, and I can only read, how in God's
>   nephew's name can I set myself up as read/write access?
>   Somehow I think this catch-22 ain't going away just because I'm at a
>   terminal line...?
>   Jim

Well, because this directory is used by the gvfs daemon and that in turn works
intimately with Nautilus, then perhaps it is a special case somehow?

But... I just checked on my system and when I run Nautilus (as my regular
user) I can both see and read the .gvfs directory (it's empty here), though
Nautilus annoyingly mixes dot files/dirs in with the normal dirs instead of
listing them first.

I still recommend doing this from the console and not from within X.  That way
you won't have those dozen Gnome processes potentially mucking things up
and/or hiding things from you.

And if all else fails, reboot into single user mode.  Ubuntu calls this
"recovery mode" in the GRUB menu.  If you can't fix it there, then you've
*definitely* got a problem on your hand.  At that point you might consider
running the appropriate fsck program for whatever filesystem you're using just
to make sure what you're seeing isn't some minor filesystem corruption.


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Research Assistant, UMass Amherst student
                        Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
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