"stat" says "permission denied", even though all the permissions are in place

Question

I have this:

ls -al /home/my_user/dir1/dir2/file1.txt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 http http 2798 Dec 30 18:18 /home/my_user/dir1/dir2/file1.txt

However, I can't stat it:

sudo -u http stat /home/my_user/dir1/dir2/file1.txt
stat: cannot stat '/home/my_user/dir1/dir2/file1.txt': Permission denied

Why? How to fix that without having to chmod 777 <path>, is there more approprivate way

?

Solution

I think you need to verify the permissions of each folder involved in the path before you get to the file itself.

Many Linux distributions default the permissions to (0700) (meaning just the user itself is allow to read/write/execute), to each folder inside the /home directory, which means that if user my_user has a file /home/my_user/dir1/dir2/file1.txt with the permissions 0755 the user http can't stat it because the default permissions I mentioned above will prevent it.

My guess is that when you executed the ls -al /home/my_user/dir1/dir2/file1.txt was with a user other than http and that user could actually read the file. If that is the case, you have to correct the permissions on all the directories with tools like chmod or setfacl if you want to be more specific.

I hope this helps.