Shell Script- Permission Denied

Question

I was trying out a very small script

#!/bin/sh

test="$(/home/dell/case3.3/private.key)"

echo $test

I call this file test1.sh

I try to access a file named private.key Here is the permission set for the file private.key -rw-rw-r--

Here is the permission set for the file test1.sh -rwxrwxrwx

I have also tried to do

chmod u+x test1.sh

and

chmod 755 test1.sh

In my agony, I also tried chmod 777 test1.sh

I believe that 777 should give it all the permissions like it did ..

I don't understand what the problem is, why is there a permission denied

I act as the super user

Solution 1

/home/dell/case3.3/private.key is not a script, and not executable. $(/home/dell/case3.3/private.key) tries to execute that file. It's unclear what you're trying to do, but perhaps what you want is:

test="$(cat /home/dell/case3.3/private.key)"
echo "$test"

---

^{Edit in response to OP's comments}

You don't need to save a whole file to a variable in order to simply display its contents. Instead, use:

cat /home/dell/case3.3/private.key

If, however, you do want to save off some part of the file, use sed, grep, or awk. For example

test="$(grep 'somethingInTheFile' /home/dell/case3.3/private.key)"
echo "$test"

Or, you could process the file line by line:

while read line; do
  echo $line
done < /home/dell/case3.3/private.key

Solution 2

test="$(/home/dell/case3.3/private.key)"

executes the file /home/dell/case3.3/private.key before assigning it to the variable $test. Since /home/dell/case3.3/private.key does not have the executable bit set you get the permission denied message.

For example on my linux system:

david@david-Mate ~ $ touch xxx
david@david-Mate ~ $ ls -l xxx
-rw-r--r-- 1 david david 0 Aug  2 12:42 xxx
david@david-Mate ~ $ test="$(./xxx)"
bash: ./xxx: Permission denied

Comments

[Addison]

Sorry run: sudo ./test1.sh But that might not work if your using windows. Idk

[user1524529]

Is there a way to fetch the contents of the file other than that?

[Tim Pote]

I don't know what you mean "fetch the contents of the file." You can use sed, awk, grep, or cat to parse a file.

[user1524529]

Oh no.. I have to do the dc ->obase and ibase since the file is too huge and it crosses the limit :(

[user1524529]

By Fetch , I meant displaying the contents of the file.

[Addison]

Sorry. I don't know then. Thats really strange

[user1524529]

I was refering to this one link

[user1524529]

Thanks a lot for that. However, I will still have to bc << EOF obase=10 ibase=2 $test EOF This way, I will be able to cut it down. without actually pulling out a part of the file and also get an arbitrary precision calculation which I can use later on :)

[user1524529]

Thanks!. That gives me some more explanation