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I am currently building a home server and I am trying to give minimal permissions to every service. I am new to permissions management and this is an awesome learning experience for me :).

  • drwxr----- 7 reazem enter-home 4096 Sep 9 21:43 reazem
  • drwxrws--- 3 reazem minidlna 4096 Sep 9 21:36 media

reazem is my home folder and media is my media folder, it is situated directly inside my home.

The minidlna user is part of the following groups : minidlna, enter-home.

I get the following error: Media directory not accessible! [/home/reazem/media]

I was hoping that because the minidlna user is part of the enter-home group, it could get inside the home folder, and then inside the media folder because it is in the minidlna group.

Where is my mistake?

Edit: I found out that chmod g+x /home/reazem solved the problem, but why? Why would you need the execute permission to get inside another directory?

Thank you!

share|improve this question
That's the deal with directories, unlike files, they need to be executable, otherwise even the owner can't access them. – mikewhatever Sep 10 '12 at 7:16
For an explanation of why folders need to be executable for the owner, see my answer here. – Mik Apr 1 at 18:30

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