Home / server / Questions / 149684
Accepted
Tony
Asked: 2010-06-10 07:39:06 +0800 CST

MySQL permissions error when showing databases

  • 772

I was trying to install homebrew and very very stupidly did this:

sudo chown -R $USER /usr/local

The Homebrew instructions say to do this and I'm not much of a sysadmin so I took their word for it. Lesson learned (although I wouldn't really know how to test this...seems like an "undo" script would be super valuable here)

Anyway, what is done is done, but now I get this error:

$ mysql -u root -p
Enter password: 
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 548
Server version: 5.1.33 Source distribution

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> show databases;
ERROR 1018 (HY000): Can't read dir of '.' (errno: 13)

I tried chown-ing back to root with no avail. Does anyone know how I can fix this without reinstalling mysql? Optionally, if I have to reinstall mysql, how can I dump my databases without access to the command line so I don't lose all of my data.

Thanks!

mysql permissions

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Find mysql's data directory, and chown that to MySQL's user (typically mysql:mysql)...

    • 1

  2. Determine what user mysql is running as (I'd use ps aux |grep mysql, but your flags to ps might differ), find where mysql is installed (mine shows in the ps results as --datadir=/usr/local/mysql/data, but you might need your screen to be wide enough so it's not truncating the command), and then change the ownership back to the correct user.

    • 1 
  3. $ cd /usr/lcoal/mysql/

$ ls -l

$ sudo -R chown mysql:mysql data/

    data/ is a directory under /usr/local/mysql/ which contains all the database.

    Now do mysql -u user -p password. You can access your database

    • 0