I have messed up my home directory. I'm using dash as my shell and by myself I can create files just fine, but others can't. I don't think that made sense as it's kind of hard to explain, so hopefully this can enlighten you:
alex@ubuntu:~$ ls -l
total 4
drwxrwxrwx 2 alex www-data 4096 Sep 21 17:55 public_html
alex@ubuntu:~$ git clone git://github.com/twitter/bootstrap
fatal: Could not switch to 'bootstrap': Permission denied
alex@ubuntu:~$ chmod 777 .
alex@ubuntu:~$ git clone git://github.com/twitter/bootstrap
fatal: destination path 'bootstrap' already exists and is not an empty directory.
alex@ubuntu:~$ rm -rf bootstrap
alex@ubuntu:~$ git clone git://github.com/twitter/bootstrap
fatal: Could not switch to 'bootstrap': Permission denied
alex@ubuntu:~$ chmod -R 777 *
alex@ubuntu:~$ git clone git://github.com/twitter/bootstrap
Cloning into 'bootstrap'...
/home/alex/bootstrap/.git/refs: Permission denied
alex@ubuntu:~$ ls -l ..
total 4
drwxrwxrwx 3 alex alex 4096 Sep 21 18:07 alex
alex@ubuntu:~$
Not sure what I've done wrong or if it relates to my umask, but any advice is welcome. Thanks!
public_htmland try view them in my browser, I get a 403 unless I chmod it to 777. – Alex Sep 21 '12 at 17:23