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Selah
Asked: 2015-09-02 07:58:14 +0800 CST

Group permissions not kicking in

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I have added a user to a group.

selah@wwbp-grand:/localdata/harvard$ groups chwinn
chwinn : chwinn perma

Then I have recursively changed the group of a directory:

sudo chgrp -R perma /localdata/harvard-OCR
selah@wwbp-grand:/localdata/harvard$ sudo chgrp -R perma /localdata/harvard-OCR
selah@wwbp-grand:/localdata/harvard$ ls -la /localdata | grep harvard-OCR
drwxr-x---   4 pwan     perma            4096 Dec 17  2012 harvard-OCR

And yet my user still cannot access this directory

selah@wwbp-grand:/localdata/harvard$ sudo su chwinn
chwinn@wwbp-grand:/localdata/harvard$ cd /localdata/harvard-OCR
bash: cd: /localdata/harvard-OCR: Permission denied

Any idea what is going on and/or how I can fix it?

EDIT: Tried A.B.s suggestion. Still getting permission denied.

selah@wwbp-grand:~$ ls -la / |grep localdata
drwxrwxr-x 131 root perma  4096 Aug 25 15:19 localdata
selah@wwbp-grand:~$ ls -la /localdata |grep harvard
drwxrwx--x  13 pwan     perma            4096 Nov 16  2013 harvard
drwxr-x---   5 pwan     perma            4096 Feb 27  2013 harvard-csv
drwxr-x---   4 pwan     perma            4096 Dec 17  2012 harvard-OCR
selah@wwbp-grand:~$ sudo su chwinn
[sudo] password for selah: 
chwinnie@wwbp-grand:/home/selah$ ls /localdata/harvard
ls: cannot open directory /localdata/harvard: Permission denied
permissions

2 Answers

  1. The folder localdata has the wrong permissions. To change the permission of a subfolder is not enough. The whole path need the right permissions.

    Either you change the group for /localdata too via 

    sudo chgrp perma /localdata

    and to be sure

    sudo chmod g+x /localdata

    or you set the the search permission for directories x for all users

    sudo chmod o+x /localdata
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  2. In the case of an NFS server, the server controls who has access to a file. This means that you need to set the permissions on the server, not locally. So basically you need to ask your server admin to create a perma group and add you to it.

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