[NTLUG:Discuss] permission detection tool(?)

[Johnny Cybermyth]

I recently made a major blunder and changed permissions on every file 
and directory in the /usr directory.  I am slowly discovering all of the 
applications that I broke.

I have an application that writes files and directories under a specific 
directory in my file system (/backup/music/).  This application now no 
longer is able to write files to that directory.  I can run the 
application using sudo and it will write just fine.

I've made sure that the destination directory is writable to me in a 
normal shell.  The directory has the following permissions:

drwxrwxr-x    root    johnny

When I look at the system monitor, it says that my application is a 
process belonging to johnny.  I'm not sure how else to check what gid 
the programming is running under.  Is there some type of trace tool that 
will detect when a program is prevented from creating a file due to 
insufficient permissions?

Any other thoughts would be appreciated.