Setting permissions

[Aswin Venkat <venkat@bevo.che.wisc.edu>]

Hi all,

I'm a relative newcomer to debian installation though i have used
debian for a while. Just recently i installed debian on my
laptop(2.4.22). Most things are working alright except my file
permissions are a little haywire. Each time i have to run say a make
file that creates or removes files in my user directory, i have to run
sudo make as opposed to just make. Also, if i want to have emacs auto
backup my files while i edit them, i have to use sudo. This seems a
little weird to me because the user(me) has ownership permissions for
all files in the directory. Is there a way that i can modify some
setup file so that i can avoid having to use sudo?.

THanks,
Aswin