ls permission denied even with execute permissions

Question

I chowned recusively /srv/site to www-data:www-data and chmodded it recursively with ug+rwx. I then added myself to group www-data.

$ sudo usermod -a -G www-data cyrus
$ sudo chgrp -R www-data /srv/site
$ sudo chmod -R ug+rwX /srv/site

However, why do I still get permission denied?

$ ls /srv/site
ls: cannot open directory /srv/site: Permission denied

$ cd /srv; ls -la   
total 12
drwxr-xr-x  3 root     root     4096 Aug 13 02:42 .
drwxr-xr-x 24 root     root     4096 Aug 11 21:20 ..
drwxrwx--x 10 www-data www-data 4096 Aug 13 02:42 site

type `id` as your user. what groups are you in? – 89c3b1b8-b1ae-11e6-b842-48d705 Aug 12 '13 at 20:37 — 89c3b1b8-b1ae-11e6-b842-48d705, Aug 12 '13 at 20:37

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 12 '13 at 19:18

6

Have you logged in again. Group membership is not normally reset once a user has logged in.

answered Aug 12 '13 at 19:18

Rik Schneider

2,419
14
19

1

Run the `id` or `groups` commands to see your current groups. You will probably find that your group list has not been updated. It doesn't take effect on existing processes/sessions/etc. – Etan Reisner Aug 12 '13 at 19:24
Yes, when I ran `groups`, `www-data` was not there. Thank you so much! – Zhianc Aug 12 '13 at 20:26

Miroslav Koškár · Answer 2 · 2013-08-12T21:07:42.033

As pointed out you have to re-login to refresh a group vector.

To not loose the context of your work (eg. other opened terminals), you might consider

user$ su - user

or

user$ newgrp www-data

then from there on you can spawn new programs with complete group vector.

In case of newgrp, what you are ending up is your primary group to be www-data (in this case), which is significant eg. when creating new files.

In case of su, I wonder how to achieve the same effect with sudo (sudo -iu user doesn't refresh the group vector).

ls permission denied even with execute permissions

2 Answers2