folder privaleges problem in Dolphin

[TheYikes2]

Hi again! Ok I have a question that in a way answers itself. I was using libre office, but when i tried to save lets call it doc1.ods to a folder it was telling me access denied. I tried saving it to a new folder and it works. Right away i knew it was down to read/write permissions. I ransudo chmod -R ugo+rw shedbooks
and retried saving the file it worked. Here's my question, why is it that when i right click the folder in Dolphin the permissions are all greyed out? I know this is only a minor thing but it has me puzzled.

Anyone have any ideas on how to remedy this?

Regards:

TheYikes

[skyfishgoo]

are you still the owner, or did owner get changed to root somehow?

[oshunluvr]

Impossible to answer since you already modified all the folders and files to world readable. Which BTW, is considered a no-no because it's unsafe - like Windows is.

Generally on Ubuntu based distros, the default permissions when a user creates a folder in /home/user are drwxrwxr-x and a file is -rw-rw-r-- and ownership is user:group - "group" being the default or primary group of the user. However, the user's home folder is drwxr-x--- This means the files in your home folder are viewable by another group member, but not editable. Since the default group membership is for each user to have their own primary group and no one else is in that group, only you can see the files.

These defaults apply to all users, including root. So if you use the root account via "sudo" to copy or move files or folders, the user:group is modified to root:root and your user account is locked out of them.

I am making an assumption because you really didn't give specific details, that you created this folder "shedbooks" as root user (sudo) or with Dolphin with "Act as Administrator" enabled and thus the shedbooks folder was owned by root and not accessible by your user.

The better way to handle this, security-wise, is to chown the folder to your user after creation and then copy files into it using your user account. This allows you to access the folder and files from your user account without sharing them with the whole world.

There are other possible scenarios and solutions such as having a shared folder if you have multiple users or mounting an entire file system with user level access.