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nickhansenrf
Asked: 2019-05-30 11:20:18 +0800 CST

How to give a specific pyqt program read/write permission?

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I'm using a program called gnuradio-companion. If I start it without root privileges, I can't save anything because I don't have read/write privileges. It gives:

/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gnuradio/grc/gui/FileDialogs.py:102: GtkWarning: Failed to read filechooser settings from "/home/nick/.config/gtk-2.0/gtkfilechooser.ini": Permission denied

If I start it with

sudo gnuradio-companion

then I'm abusing sudo, and also I get 

QStandardPaths: XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not set, defaulting to '/tmp/runtime-root'

because I lose the runtime variable XDG_RUNTIME_DIR. I can use 

sudo -E

to preserve environment variables but then I get

QStandardPaths: wrong ownership on runtime directory /run/user/1000, 1000 instead of 0

I guess because I'm just borrowing root privileges. Using sudo visudo to modify runtime environments gives the same thing.

How should I configure read/write privileges and run time environments to resolve this?

permissions sudo pyqt

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This is why you should not run graphical programs as root in the first place...

    Run

    sudo chown nick:nick /home/nick/.config/gtk-2.0/gtkfilechooser.ini

    to restore ownership of the configuration file. This of course assumes that the username is nick

    You may want to do this recursively for all of ~/.config

    sudo chown -R nick:nick /home/nick/.config/
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