~/.gconf problem

[Chris Green]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 10:17:51AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Wednesday 23 July 2014 06:40:35 Chris Green did opine
> And Gene did reply:
> > On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 04:29:53AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > > Greetings all;
> > > 
> > > Can someone tell be what to do with /home/me/.gconf?
> > > 
> > > According to an ls -la:
> > > drw-r-xr-x  4 gene gene   4096 2014-07-22 12:48 .gconf
> > > 
> > > I own the thing, and I ought to be able to do whatever I want with
> > > it, including copying a tree from a machine that gedit works on, to
> > > a machine it won't work on.
> > 
> > Except that you don't have 'x' permission which will prevent you
> > cd'ing to it.  To be able to enter a directory you need 'x' permission.
> > 
> > Standard, let everyone see but only I can write, permission is:-
> > 
> > drwxr-xr-x  4 gene gene   4096 2014-07-22 12:48 .gconf
> > 
> > 0755
> And I find, on a machine where it all Just Works(TM)
> drwsrwsrwx  4 gene gene   4096 2014-07-22 12:48 .gconf
> 
> "s"? don't have a clue what that tells me.  Don't recall ever noticing 
> that before. ???  Man page for ls doesn't discuss it.  And I have yet to 
> find a translation table that deciphers the 4 octal bytes normally used to 
> set this stuff.  I have only been using linux since 1998, seems like I 
> should have stumbled onto it somewhere in 16 years.
> 
It's the SetUID bit and has different meanings according to whether
it's on the owner, group or world bits.  Take a look at the chmod man
page and that will clarify.

-- 
Chris Green