[PLUG] Permissions problem

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Fri Mar 15 15:59:28 UTC 2013


The Xfce GUI file manager (Thunar) refused to let me copy files
from /media/1TBDisk3/Movies/ to /media/Movies/ on my desktop computer by
dragging and dropping. So I decided to try the cp command instead. This
also failed. The command I used was:

$ cp -r /media/1TBDisk3/* /media/Movies/

Eventually I tried "sudo chown -r jjj:jjj /media" and then the above
command worked.

It took a long time because there were a lot of files (I left it copying
files when I went to bed last night), but this morning I saw that the
command line returned to $.So I tried to umount the drive in order to
move it to my laptop, but I kept getting the "drive is busy" error
message. However, all drive lights had been out for hours so I just
unplugged it.

Now it is plugged into the laptop and apparently mounted:

$ mount
/dev/sdc on /media/Movies type ext4
(rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,data=ordered,uhelper=udisks)

But I am unable to perform file operations with Thunar or Nautilus. So
I tried from the command line and got:

[jjj at Devil8 Movies]$ rm -r New Folder/
rm: remove write-protected directory `New Folder'? y
rm: cannot remove `New Folder': Permission denied

The permissions for all folders and files on the disk are drwxr-xr-x. I
could try chown again, but I am wondering if I messed up when I did
that on the other computer. I am jjj:jjj on both computers. There is
also a 2 GB SD card mounted on the laptop  (0123-4567), and from the
command line I get:

[jjj at Devil8 media]$ ls -la
total 12
drwxr-xr-x   4 root root  100 Mar 15 08:20 .
drwxr-xr-x. 30 root root 4096 Nov 17 08:00 ..
drwx------   3 jjj  jjj  4096 Dec 31  1969 0123-4567
-rw-------   1 root root    0 Mar 13 20:05 .hal-mtab-lock
drwxr-xr-x  10 1000 1000 4096 Mar 14 22:43 Movies

Clearly the permissions for the 2 GB SD card (which works as expected)
and the 3 TB USB drive are different, which must be the source of the
problem. What I can't figure out is what "10 1000 1000" means on the
Movies drive or how to get chown (or chmod?) to change the permissions
on it to match the 0123-4567 drive. I read the man pages for chown and
chmod and now I'm more confused than before.

Suggestions?



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