File create permission error although dir has 777 permission

Question

On running command touch file I am getting error

touch: cannot touch 'file': permission denied

Although I have 777 permissions on the dir where I am trying to create file but still not able to create file with one particular user, some other users can create files there.

Tried strace to see what might be root cause but not able to to understand strace output. One line and I guess relevant as well of strace output is:

open("file", O_WRONGLY|O_CREATE|O_NOCTTY|O_NONBLOCK, 0666) = -1  EACESS (Permission denied)

I tried to create file with specific permissions as well but getting permission error, command tried is:

install -b -m 511 /dev/null file

Solution 1

Possibly it is overriden by a filesystem access control list. Possibly Linux ACL? You may determine that by using lsfacl.

Get current ACL - You can check permissions for any file or directory with getfacl. See example below.

# getfacl dir/ file: dir owner: root group: root user::rwx group::--- other::---

Set permissions with ACL - You may set "mode" 0777 for a directory with inheritance in the access control lists with setfacl -d -m o::rwx /directory

Solution 2

I ran into this issue as well. For me, the problem was that I had given the necessary rwx permissions to the parent directory:

chmod 777 parent_dir

but I was trying to touch a file in a subdirectory that I didn't had permission to.

> touch parent_dir/subdir/file.txt
touch: cannot touch 'parent_dir/subdir/file.txt': Permission denied

If this is your issue, the command you are looking for is, for example

chmod -R 777 parent_dir

Comments

[Andy Dalton]

Does a file with that name already exist, and if so is it owned by a different user?

[user3411123]

Please check this answer. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/369012/umask-not-wo‌​rking

[Vipin]

@AndyDalton no file is there with this name I tried with other names as well

[Vipin]

@user3411123 the question you gave looks like completely different to me

[Vipin]

Can you explain this sometimes case, why it might happen ? Although this is not true in my case. Generally users doesn't have access to all parent dirs in hierarchy.