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I have an account on a shared host running FreeBSD 5.5-STABLE. I was compiling my own version of Ruby today, and encountered this anomaly: If I tried to execute 'make', I get a "permission denied" error. However, if I execute:

cd .

And then 

make

Everything work just fine. Any clue why this happens? It obviously isn't causing me problems as I am eventually able to execute make just fine, but I am very curious what is going on here.

Matt
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  • What was your working directory before, then after, the "cd ."? – Bart Silverstrim May 17 '11 at 17:13
  • @Bart I had downloaded the Ruby source to ~/src, and unpacked the tar.gz from there, so it was something like ~/src/ruby-01.8.7/, and I was operating directly from inside the unpacked ruby source directory. – Matt May 17 '11 at 17:15
  • Was there a permission difference in the directories you were in before and after the "cd ."? – Bart Silverstrim May 17 '11 at 17:29
  • @Bart - I'm not sure I follow. Wouldn't a 'cd .' just say 'change directory to current directory', in which case the permissions before and after are the same, since no chmod was done in conjunction? the ~/src is 755, and ~/src/ruby-1.8.7 is 755 as well (and both owned by my user) – Matt May 17 '11 at 17:32
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    Could potentially do a difference if there are/were symlinks in the path before/after the `cd .`, but that does sound strange. – Mat May 17 '11 at 17:34
  • It shouldn't matter. I was just asking just in case it wasn't behaving as expected. – Bart Silverstrim May 17 '11 at 17:36

1 Answers1

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I think maybe it's FreeBSD (weird) bug (or just my lack of knowledge about BSD ports/shell). Look at here.

Grzegorz Szpetkowski
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  • A bug from 2007? Really? :-/ – Bart Silverstrim May 17 '11 at 17:38
  • @Bart it is a very old shared host. Or rather, a very old account on a host previously known as TextDrive that was later purchased by Joyent. The account is a grandfathered account and the system is probably as old as the account, circa 2006/2007 – Matt May 17 '11 at 17:42
  • Though it does seem rather odd that a 'make' bug could make it into any stable release – Matt May 17 '11 at 17:42
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    Bug mentioned above was closed as bogus because it was caused by missing `x` bit in /home directory rights. – AlexD May 17 '11 at 18:10
  • BTW, I think that removing `x` bit from /home directory is pretty common on shared hosting so that users denied access to each other home directories. – AlexD May 17 '11 at 18:12