Does SCP have a problem setting file permissions or have I misconfiguration my server?
Use case:
There is a file on a server that I want to edit called "importantFile.txt". The file has owner and group of "master":
ls -l importantFile.txt:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 master master 7 Mar 18 08:11 importantFile.txt
I am called "slave" but luckily, I am in group "master" so I can edit the file as I see fit. However, I'm a lazy slave and can't be bothered to edit the file on the server, I'd prefer to edit the file on my local machine and SCP it to the server:
echo "bored slave info" > importantFile.txt
scp importantFile.txt slave#theServerAddress:/pathToFile/importantFile.txt
If I do this, the contents of the file on the server are uploaded fine and the timestamp of the file is updated but the permissions of the file don't change, the file is still owned by "master". This is a problem because if "slave" uploaded bad content, no one would know it was "slave" who caused the problem, "master" would look guilty.
Perhaps I have to set a umask? if so where? I tried .bash_profile without success and haven't found anything on Google about umask in /etc/ssh/sshd_config.
That's nothing special about scp - try logging on to the server as slave, and editing the file using your favourite text editor... You'll find the same behaviour occurs... Writing to a file does not make you the owner of the file.
Example:
as root
#cd /tmp
#mkdir fubar
#chgrp vboxusers fubar
#cd fubar/
#touch testfile
#chgrp vboxusers testfile
#chmod g+w . testfile
#ls -al
total 16
drwxrwxr-x 2 root vboxusers 4096 2009-03-19 10:30 .
drwxrwxrwt 15 root root 12288 2009-03-19 10:29 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root vboxusers 0 2009-03-19 10:30 testfile
#echo foo > testfile
#ls -al
total 20
drwxrwxr-x 2 root vboxusers 4096 2009-03-19 10:30 .
drwxrwxrwt 15 root root 12288 2009-03-19 10:29 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root vboxusers 4 2009-03-19 10:30 testfile
as user (in vboxusers group)
>cd /tmp/fubar
>ls -al
total 20
drwxrwxr-x 2 root vboxusers 4096 2009-03-19 10:30 .
drwxrwxrwt 15 root root 12288 2009-03-19 10:29 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root vboxusers 4 2009-03-19 10:30 testfile
>echo bar >> testfile
>ls -al
total 20
drwxrwxr-x 2 root vboxusers 4096 2009-03-19 10:30 .
drwxrwxrwt 15 root root 12288 2009-03-19 10:29 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root vboxusers 8 2009-03-19 10:31 testfile
>vim testfile
>ls -al
total 20
drwxrwxr-x 2 root vboxusers 4096 2009-03-19 10:31 .
drwxrwxrwt 15 root root 12288 2009-03-19 10:31 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root vboxusers 12 2009-03-19 10:31 testfile
>cat testfile
foo
bar
baz
You have to delete the file to overwrite it. Wether you are able to do that depends on the directory's permissions and ownership. Hijacking ownership of an already existing file is not possible. The write permission you have is only applied on the contents of the file.
It seems you can configure how Emacs deals with this through the backup-by-copying-when-mismatch variable (see the Emacs Manual or type C-h-v backup-by-copying-when-mismatch in Emacs).
I actually filed a bug report about this, because I thought it was a bug in Tramp.
I had misunderstood the way files work, modifying file contents do not change ownership or group.
Why the confusion? EMACS - Whenever I was editing a file I was using Emacs and Emacs does change the owner and group to the current user. It does this because it makes a backup file at save time by moving the "filename" to "filename~" and creating a new file called "filename" - because it's a new file, it has the current users file permissions. I guess this is 1up to VI fans?
Related
I am very new to linux and am using putty and pscp to move files to a live hosted directory. I would like to rename my recently uploaded dist folder to its actual project name using mv but get a permission denied error. What is the safest and most reasonable way to arrange these files so I can rename them?
lawton#lawtonb:/var/www/html$ ls -la
total 268
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Aug 30 16:42 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Aug 18 23:05 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 lawton lawton 253276 Aug 27 18:06 bundle.js
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 30 16:42 dist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17 Aug 18 23:24 info.php
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 27 18:59 react-youtube
lawton#lawtonb:/var/www/html$ mv dist BTC_Sorter
mv: cannot move 'dist' to 'BTC_Sorter': Permission denied
If this is a one-time rename, your best course of action would be to run mv with sudo, like this:
sudo mv dist BTC_Sorter
If, however, you'd like to have permissions for your user or group, you should do some reading about chown (The link belongs to the Arch Linux wiki, but should be useful regardless of your distro).
In your particular case, the directory dist is owned both by the user and the group root, hence why you'd need to use sudo, chown or simply the root account.
You are not the owner of the file, you need execute the command with sudo
sudo mv src dest
I'd like to think I'm not a linux noob but I am having an issue I can't explain. I hope it something stupid. I have an external drive that I am trying to set up on plex. It was originally formatted ntfs but I shrunk the partition and made another ext4 partition. Plex can't look into the drive and see the folders. I have been trying to change the perms but they aren't sticking. They don't stick if
myUser#mint /media/myUser $ ls -lah
total 44K
drwxr-x---+ 6 root root 4.0K Oct 24 11:21 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K Oct 24 10:50 ..
drwx------ 1 myUser myUser 20K Oct 14 07:27 DataDisk
myUser#myUserMint /media/myUser $ sudo chmod -R 766 DataDisk/
[sudo] password for myUser:
myUser#mint /media/myUser $ ls -lah
total 44K
drwxr-x---+ 6 root root 4.0K Oct 24 11:21 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K Oct 24 10:50 ..
drwx------ 1 myUser myUser 20K Oct 14 07:27 DataDisk
myUser#mint /media/myUser $
Am I missing something obvious or is this just weird?
I'm struggling to understand how to apply directory and file permissions so that files and directories created by the ftp user, via an ftp client, are browsable. In other words 755 is applied by default.
I'm running Apache 2 on Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS, Trusty Tahr, with vsftpd server.
My directory structure is as follows.
var/www/
var/www/sites/
var/www/sites/master_demo/public_html
var/www/sites/test_site/public_html
I've run the following
usermod -aG www-data test_user
chgrp -R www-data /var/www/sites/test_site/public_html/
chown -R test_site:www-data /var/www/sites/test_site/public_html/
chmod -R 755 /var/www/sites/test_site/public_html/
Permissions on the directories are as follows:
cd var/www/sites/
ls -l
dr-xrws--- 3 master_demo www-data 4096 Jun 17 14:00 master_demo
drwxr-xr-x 3 test_site www-data 4096 Jun 16 13:32 test_site
cd var/www/sites/test_site/
ls -l
drwxr-xr-x 3 test_site www-data 4096 Jun 17 17:43 public_html
When a file is added using ftp by the test_site user these are the permissions
-rw------- 1 test_site test_site 152 Jun 18 08:27 about.html
drwx------ 2 test_site test_site 4096 Jun 18 08:27 css
-rw------- 1 test_site test_site 152 Jun 18 08:27 index.html
How do I get the file to automatically be given the correct permissions so the files are browsable (755)? I know the obvious answer might be to run a batch file, but is that necessary? I don't want to have to run the command everytime.
chmod -R 755 /var/www/sites/test_site/public_html/*
ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 test_site test_site 152 Jun 18 08:27 about.html
drwxr-xr-x 2 test_site test_site 4096 Jun 18 08:27 css
-rwxr-xr-x 1 test_site test_site 152 Jun 18 08:27 index.html
I'm new to linux so please be gentle :)
I can confirm that test_site users is in the www-data group
id test_site
uid=1004(test_site) gid=1005(test_site) groups=1005(test_site),33(www-data)
I think what you are looking for is umask
umask 0022
umask -p
umask -S
You will need to modify your default /etc/profile in order to make this permanent. umask 0022will on creation give directories chmod 755 and files chmod 644 which is the recommended permissions for the www folder in apache.
Example
umask 0022
mkdir www
touch www/{index.html,style.css}
drwxr-xr-x. 2 user user 4096 Jun 18 10:53 .
drwxr-xr-x. 3 user user 4096 Jun 18 10:52 ..
-rw-r--r--. 1 user user 0 Jun 18 10:53 index.html
-rw-r--r--. 1 user user 0 Jun 18 10:53 style.css
FTP also supports setting umask before initiating a transfer. Setting it with ftp, sets if for that transfer only, so that you don't need to change it system-wide as you would with /etc/profile.
I have made an rpm package that install a program and one of the folders it needs to copy a file to is a symbolic link since the program the symbolic link is pointing to may change over time so it is easier to maintain the building of the rpm package by copying the file to the symbolic link rather then to the hard coded path. However, I get the error
cp: cannot overwrite directory with non-directory
when the rpm package tried to copy the file to the symbolic link folder. Why does this happen, and is there anything I can do to work around this error other then making the files to be copied to the folder the symbolic link points to? I am running RHEL 6.6 as of note.
That error generally means something like you having told cp to treat the target as a normal file (the -T argument).
$ ls -lR
.:
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 6 09:46 dir
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 6 09:45 file
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Feb 6 09:45 symdir -> dir
./dir:
total 0
$ cp -T file symdir
cp: cannot overwrite non-directory `symdir' with non-directory
$ ls -lR
.:
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 6 09:46 dir
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 6 09:45 file
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Feb 6 09:45 symdir -> dir
./dir:
total 0
$ cp file symdir
$ ls -lR
.:
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 6 09:46 dir
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 6 09:45 file
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Feb 6 09:45 symdir -> dir
./dir:
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 6 09:46 file
I am currently creating an application that requires separate users running duplicate programs. They cannot run under root because of security reasons, so they are initiated by a Java app that I am working on, and I am starting them with runuser -l. However, I cannot cd into a directory, even though it is owned by the user, and the user has 770 permissions in the folder.
Here's what I'm running:
runuser -l lp1 -c 'java \-jar /root/Desktop/workspace/LitePanel/servers/server1/server.jar \-Xms1024M nogui'
And the output of this is:
runuser: warning: cannot change directory to /root/Desktop/workspace/LitePanel/bin/servers/server1/: Permission denied
Here's an ls -all:
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 4096 Jan 30 14:03 .
drwxr-xr-x. 7 root root 4096 Jan 30 14:02 ..
drwxrwx---. 2 lp1 lp1 4096 Jan 31 03:07 server1
Inside the directory:
drwxrwx---. 2 lp1 lp1 4096 Jan 31 03:07 .
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 4096 Jan 30 14:03 ..
-rwxrwx---. 1 lp1 lp1 9170551 Jan 31 03:07 server.jar
And here's /etc/passwd:
lp1:x:501:501::/root/Desktop/workspace/LitePanel/bin/servers/server1/:/bin/false
Anyone know why this is happening? It looks like the user has the necessary permissions to do this.
You have said that the directory itself has permissions 770 and is owned by the user, but what about its parents? I believe the cd command will need at least read access (and possibly execute) on the parent directories.