pwd: permission denied - only for oracle user in 1 dir

[John C. Simmons]

Hi, I'm running HP-UX 10.20 with Oracle and SAP on this system. When the oracle user (orasid) cd's into a directory and issues a cd .. or pwd he receives the error - pwd: permission denied or cd: permission denied. This only occurs in one directory and only for this one user.

As root ./ and ../ show up normally, but as orasid only ./ shows up along with the other files.

There are no symbolic links in this directory and all permissions show to be correct. We have unmounted and remounted this filesystem, but this did not help either.

Any ideas or suggestions? I really don't wish to offload this filesystem, delete it and recreate it, if I don't have to.

Thanks,
John C. Simmons

[RikTytgat · Accepted solution]

Hi,

This seems to be a problem with the permissions of the directory.

To 'cd' into a directory, you need the 'x' permission. To read the contents, the 'r' permission is required, and to create/delete files, the 'w' permission is a must.

You should check that the user oracle has the 'x' permission on the directory ..

Hope this helps,
Rik.

[Ed Ulfers]

I had a similar situation which seemed unexplainable at first. Im my case the directory was a mount point. When the filesystem was unmounted, the mount point directory permissions explained the issue. When the filesystem was mounted, these permissions were not visible.

I'm not sure if this is your case, but mine took a lot of head scratching before explaining.

[John C. Simmons]

Thank you both for your input. We found the problem last night when we unmounted the filesystem again and checked the permissions of the underlying structure. Once we corrected the underlying permissions, that fixed the problem.

Thanks again for your input and help.