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Eaten by a Grue
Asked: 2016-07-29 12:24:39 +0800 CST

Permission denied using "man"

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For some reason an Ubuntu server (14.04.4 LTS) I'm working on will not allow "man" to be run by regular user. Example:

man ls
man: can't change directory to '/root': Permission denied
man: command exited with status 255: (cd /root && LESS=-ix8RmPm Manual page ls(1) ?ltline %lt?L/%L.:byte %bB?s/%s..?e (END):?pB %pB\%.. (press h for help or q to quit)$PM Manual page ls(1) ?ltline %lt?L/%L.:byte %bB?s/%s..?e (END):?pB %pB\%.. (press h for help or q to quit)$ MAN_PN=ls(1) pager -s)

How might this have happened and more importantly how can I fix it?

UPDATE:

Seems this only occurs after I su user where "user" is a non privileged user. Workaround is to su -l user but I still don't understand why man would become a privileged command without the login flag.

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1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You are currently in the folder /root.

    man runs some command including cd <current folder>. In this case that is cd /root (compare the 2nd line of the error). But that is not allowed for non-root user.

    The following will work:

    cd ~ && man ls

    To reproduce the same behaviour you can do this:

    $ sudo su
# cd /root
# su normal_user
$ man ls
man: can't change directory to '/root': Permission denied
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