How to fix this mysql permission problem?

Question

I'm trying like mad to get rails dbconsole to work (Rails 3.2.6, if that helps). The problem is that when I run the command, I get:

gems/railties-3.2.6/lib/rails/commands/dbconsole.rb:81:in `exec': Permission denied -
/usr/local/bin/mysql (Errno::EACCES)

I am using OS X Lion, and the usual way of running mysql at the command line works - it just doesn't work through rails dbconsole. The permissions on the /usr/local/bin/mysql are:

$ ls -la /usr/local/bin/mysql
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  admin  16 Mar 13 20:27 /usr/local/bin/mysql -> /usr/local/mysql

The user I am calling these commands from is in the 'Admin' group (as evidenced in the Preferences -> Users dialog)

Any ideas on how to fix this? What could be the cause of mysql being able to run at the command line but not through another program (ruby/rails in this case).

And while I'm at this permissions problem, could you point me to a decent article/book/method that will help me to understand the permissions system and help troubleshoot such problems in future?

Answer 1

Conjecture: mysql doesn't run /usr/local/bin/mysql, but a mysql executable at some other location in $PATH. It is unusual to have /usr/local/mysql be an executable file: I would expect it to be a directory, if it exists at all. Run

type mysql

to see what mysql really runs, and if necessary, correct the /usr/local/bin/mysql symbolic link to point to the right place.

You can see what is really behind the symbolic link by adding the -L option to ls (and -d, in case it turns out to be a directory):

ls -lLd /usr/local/bin/mysql