2

I'm having trouble with my webserver an noticed that the output of ls -la /var/www contains irregularily ? instead of permission digits, e.g. 

$ LANGUAGE=C ls -la /var/www/
ls: cannot access /var/www/dokuwiki: Permission denied
ls: cannot access /var/www/joomla: Permission denied
ls: cannot access /var/www/..: Permission denied
ls: cannot access /var/www/index.html: Permission denied
ls: cannot access /var/www/mediawiki: Permission denied
ls: cannot access /var/www/html: Permission denied
ls: cannot access /var/www/postfixadmin: Permission denied
ls: cannot access /var/www/awffull: Permission denied
ls: cannot access /var/www/index.lighttpd.html: Permission denied
ls: cannot access /var/www/drupal: Permission denied
ls: cannot access /var/www/sarg: Permission denied
ls: cannot access /var/www/.: Permission denied
ls: cannot access /var/www/trac: Permission denied
total 0
d????????? ? ? ? ?            ? .
d????????? ? ? ? ?            ? ..
d????????? ? ? ? ?            ? awffull
d????????? ? ? ? ?            ? dokuwiki
d????????? ? ? ? ?            ? drupal
d????????? ? ? ? ?            ? html
-????????? ? ? ? ?            ? index.html
-????????? ? ? ? ?            ? index.lighttpd.html
d????????? ? ? ? ?            ? joomla
d????????? ? ? ? ?            ? mediawiki
d????????? ? ? ? ?            ? postfixadmin
d????????? ? ? ? ?            ? sarg
d????????? ? ? ? ?            ? trac

sudo ls -la /var/www produces

$ sudo ls -la /var/www/
insgesamt 52
drwxr--r-- 11 www-data www-data 4096 Mai 17 23:37 .
drwxr-xr-x 15 root     root     4096 Apr 27 14:51 ..
drw-r--r--  2 www-data www-data 4096 Mai 12 15:34 awffull
drwxr-xr-x  2 www-data www-data 4096 Apr 21 23:55 dokuwiki
drwxr-xr-x  2 www-data www-data 4096 Apr 21 23:55 drupal
drw-r--r--  2 www-data www-data 4096 Apr  3 14:21 html
-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  177 Apr 21 23:54 index.html
-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data 3568 Mai  1 11:13 index.lighttpd.html
drwxr-xr-x  2 www-data www-data 4096 Apr 21 23:55 joomla
drwxr-xr-x  2 www-data www-data 4096 Apr 27 18:58 mediawiki
drwxr-xr-x  2 www-data www-data 4096 Apr 21 23:55 postfixadmin
drw-r--r--  2 www-data www-data 4096 Mai 12 15:05 sarg
drwxr-xr-x  2 www-data www-data 4096 Apr 21 23:55 trac

which corresponds to the result of my chmod and chown invokations (after the problem occured). The directories dokuwiki, drupal, joomla, mediawiki trac are mount points (options rw,bind) of another partitions. I invoked ls with both mounted and unmounted directories. Everything worked like a charm on Ubuntu 13.10.

Kalle Richter
  • 6,519

1 Answers1

3

It is caused by the fact that you don't have execute permission on the directories. Fix this by using chmod o+x directory. Make sure you don't make files executable unless you want them to be. It is not dangerous for directories to be executable. It only means you're allowed to traverse the directory.

Jo-Erlend Schinstad
  • 29,687