Permission and Ownership Blues

Linux Chronicles, chapter VI: In Which the Author gets the Permission and Ownership Blues....

Well, it all seems to come down to permissions, ownership, PATH , and other environment variables. Truthfully, when even all the gurus in Linux newsgroup land think my crontab file should cause my cron daemon to do the job correctly, I am at a loss. Mysteriously, what works at the BASH shell does not seem to work as a crond daemon, even though I set all files to root ownership and make all things permissible to all people. No error messages are recorded, cron log show the Python scripts being called appropriately, no mail is sent to ron, but nothing really seems to happen. It's not supposed to be like this.

I bet many newbies give up in frustration over the permission and ownership blues, which seem to strike whenever one tries something new.

There must be a better way.

Can't a script be created to set all permission and ownership issues aside, at least for a trial run to see if everything else works properly? I know it violates security concerns, but hey, if every single newbie has to spend hours running around setting individual file permissions and ownerships to get anything new to work, how much lost time is that? (Just try to tell me you haven't done it yourself, wink, wink ). And how many lost users are there, who just give up and go back to Windows? There must be a better way. Otherwise, one never knows whether it is permissions or something else going wrong, adding to the mass confusion. In fact, I think permission issues multiply confusion geometrically.

Ouch.

I got the permission and ownership blues, Mamma, big time tonight...............

Ron Stephens
February 10, 2002