Home / ubuntu / Questions / 159853
Accepted
dotancohen
Asked: 2012-07-05 23:17:37 +0800 CST

Why can't I mkdir?

  • 772

It seems to me that I have the proper permissions, so why can't I create directories in my $HOME directory?

dotancohen@neptune:~$ whoami
dotancohen
dotancohen@neptune:~$ pwd
/home/dotancohen
dotancohen@neptune:~$ ls -l .. | grep dotancohen
drwxr-xr-x 16 shelly shelly  4096 Jul  2 15:02 dotancohen
dotancohen@neptune:~$ mkdir test
mkdir: cannot create directory `test': Permission denied
dotancohen@neptune:~$
kubuntu

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Somehow your home directory is owned by user shelly. If you have sudo privileges, you can change it back:

    sudo chown -R dotancohen:dotancohen /home/dotancohen
    • 5

  2. Well obviously you don't own your own home directory but shelly does. You may only execute (or read execute; if you are in the same group as shelly is). Therefore you cannot create a directory. Sudo can though; so sudo mkdir test should work. You might want to reown this directory for your user dotancohen as superuser. See mapage chown for that.

    • 2