Re: /var permissions ???

[maillists@sonictech.net]

On Sun, Jun 13, 1999 at 06:14:45PM -0400, Jonathan D. Proulx wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I recently moved /var to the partition windoze used to occupy.
> 
> To do this (after reformatting the partition):
> # mkdir /vartemp
> # mount /dev/hda1 -t ext2 /vartemp
> # cp -R /var/* /vartemp
> 
> I then set up /etc/fstab to mount /dev/hda1 at /var and later wiped the original /var.  It has been a little while so I'm not 100% on exactly what I did.
> 
> The problem is that only root can write to /var or any subdirectories.  So users cannot use `man` and there are other miscellaneous errors.
> 
> I thought this should work:
> drwxr-xr-x  18 root     root         1024 May 10 16:21 var
> 
> But it doesn't:
> $ man test
> Reformatting test(1), please wait...
> man: can't create /var/catman/cat1/4071: Permission denied

It looks like you should have cp -a (same as -dpR?) to preserve the
permissions for the subdirectories of /var.  Consider this:

bart:~$ ls -ld /var
drwxr-xr-x  19 root     root         1024 May 15 23:24 /var
bart:~$ ls -ld /var/catman
drwxr-sr-x  12 man      root         1024 Jun 13 06:53 /var/catman
bart:~$ 

-- 
Ray