[NTLUG:Discuss] Interesting problem?

[Leroy Tennison]

Fred wrote:
> OK, gurus, here's one:
>
> I just installed opensuse 11.2  in a new (to me) box on a new drive 
> because the old system cpu had brain cancer and was dying. So,
> I moved the old drive into the new box. I decided to copy all the data
> from the old /home/user1 to the new /home/user1 (mounted old drive 
> as /home2, if you wondered). All the files in the old user1 are owned
> by user1 and belong to the users group, just like the new user1.
>
> Some of you who know the answer are way ahead of me now... 
>
> When I log in as user1, I cannot enter any dot directory in the old 
> drive's user1 area. Root can, of course, but why cannot user1?
> If I copy them over with root, their ownership/group becomes root.
> If I then reset the owner/group to user1/users, they still cannot
> be accessed by user1.
>
> The error says that I do not have permissions to enter that directory.
> Why? What is different in the system? Both users are the same name
> and belong to the same group... at least, as far as I can see. 
> Obviously there is some difference.
>
> I could have sworn I was able to do this once on some earlier 
> version of Linux, but not now, no how.
>
> How do I fix it? How do I get the contents of those directories
> into the new /home/user1 so that he can read them?
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Fred
>
>
>
>       
>
> _______________________________________________
> http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
>   
Well, I'll take a couple of guesses.  Do the directories show to be
owned by the current user1?  If UIDs are different then having the same
name doesn't matter.  The dot directories did get copied, didn't they? 
Do they have the executable attribute?  If you can't figure it our it
might be time to use 'chown -R ...' and/or 'chmod -R ...'.  I've had to
do that before.