Yrurtj

I get permission denied when trying to move folder Music via mv although directory owner is set to my user and user permissions are set to 7. What's going on?

(I know that I could use sudo but I want to find out what's wrong. Something smells fishy here). Ps: I am on Mac OS X El Capitan.

Do note that, when in folder a, moving b to c, the folder permissions of a determine what you can do.

In this case, the permissions on . will be most important.

Observe that the permissions are more complex than simply rwx. Your music folder has an @ at the end, the . folder has a + at the end.

• Use xattr -h to determine the complex permissions for the @ symbol.


• Use getfacl to determine the ACL for the + symbol.

Seems like as if there was at least 1 file somewhere deep in that directory that didn't have right permissions.

So, what I did was:

sudo chown -R valmar ./Music

sudo chmod -R 755 ./Music

Now it works.

I had this problem when a set of programs was running in a directory I was trying to remove. In order to move the directory, I had to first kill all running programs from that directory.

I used the following commands, for reference:

ps aux | grep -I [NAME_OF_ANNOYING_PROGRAM] | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | sudo xargs kill -9

sudo mv /usr/local/[NAME_OF_ANNOYING_PROGRAM] /usr/local/[NAME_OF_ANNOYING_PROGRAM]2

Obviously, [NAME_OF_ANNOYING_PROGRAM] will be different in every case and the directory you're trying to move may be different than the name of the program.

Either way, the general procedure is:

1. kill all programs running from the directory in question


2. attempt to rename directory


3. if that fails, force kill all programs from the directory


4. attempt to rename directory


5. if that fails, see if the program is running again, I.e. that it has been restarted by some daemon program running from a different directory


6. force kill the daemon program that restarts the annoying program


7. force kill the annoying program


8. rename directory


9. profit

I was using Windows Subsystem for Linux. I had the directory open in a different bash instance. Closing it let me move the directory.

The problem here likely has to do with the Access Control List (ACL) of the Music folder. The ACL is a separate permission system to the regular POSIX ones that are normally listed by ls -l. Some other directories in the Home folder and elsewhere also have ACLs.

To see the ACLs within the home directory, use:

/bin/ls -le ~

You will likely see a rule like 0: group:everyone deny delete for the Music directory. As you noted you could override the problem with sudo. If you don't want to do that (or can't), you have other options, given that you're the owner of the file. You can strip off the offending entry from the Music directory's ACL, based on its index (0 in the example I gave above):

/bin/chmod -a# 0 Music

Or you can strip off all entries in the ACL:

/bin/chmod -N Music

Now you can move the directory around (subject to the regular POSIX permissions). If you want to put the ACL back after the move, you could use:

/bin/chmod +a "group:everyone deny delete" Music_tmp

And use /bin/ls -le again to confirm the ACL is as you want it. Check out the ACL examples in man chmod for more info. In particular, this intro is helpful:

Each file has one ACL, containing an ordered list of entries. Each entry refers to a user or group, and grants or denies a set of permissions. In cases where a user and a group exist with the same name, the user/group name can be prefixed with "user:" or "group:" in order to specify the type of name.