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Can someone tell me what I'm missing here? I'm in a group that owns the "mediawiki" directory and all of its subdirectories, but I can't write to the folder for some reason. I'm connected to SSH, but I've tried re-authenticating to SSH and even rebooting the server.

[02.26.2016/10:50:59] myuser@wikiserver $ ls -la
total 16
drwxrwxr-x  4 www-data www-data 4096 Feb 26 10:45 .
drwxr-xr-x 13 root     root     4096 Feb 23 17:42 ..
drwxrwxr-x  2 www-data www-data 4096 Feb 23 18:20 html
drwxr-xr-x 15 www-data www-data 4096 Feb 26 10:25 mediawiki

[02.26.2016/10:50:59] myuser@wikiserver $ touch mediawiki/test.txt
touch: cannot touch ‘mediawiki/test.txt’: Permission denied

[02.26.2016/10:53:48] myuser@wikiserver $ groups myuser
myuser : myuser adm cdrom sudo dip www-data plugdev lpadmin sambashare

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I just simply want everyone in that group to be able to write to the mediawiki folder and its subdirectories.

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  • Did you log out of your login session and log back in after the file/dir ownership change or group membership change ? If you have more than one terminal open or you have an X-interface running, it is a good idea to exit from everything and come from a clean slate. – MelBurslan Feb 26 '16 at 17:59
  • Yeah I've rebooted, relogged into the user, etc. – user3447014 Feb 26 '16 at 18:06
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The group www-data does not have write permissions on that folder, only the owner can write to that directory.

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Your group needs this permission drwxr**-**xr-x set it by running sudo chmod 775 ./mediawiki

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  • Yes, that would do the trick. But I think you also would have to run chmod -R 775 ./mediawiki to change all subfolders and files. – Thomas Feb 26 '16 at 18:04
  • for existing files and folders - yes ) but question was how to create new ones ) – Ivan Temchenko Feb 26 '16 at 18:05
  • Thanks. Don't I need to add "g" somewhere with chmod so that this only affects the group and not everyone else? – user3447014 Feb 26 '16 at 18:07
  • the permissions contains 3 types of users owner|group|all, and when you setting the permission you do that by numbers: 7 - owner, 7 - group, 5 - all, in total: 775 ;) – Ivan Temchenko Feb 26 '16 at 18:09
  • Check your formatting, and I think you have got the permission wrong: you say they need drwxr-xr-x, but they need drwxrwxr-x. The chmod looks ok though. – ctrl-alt-delor Feb 26 '16 at 18:43
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What is the output of $ id? From your question, it is not clear what your primary and secondary groups are.

A user can only write to a directory not owned by him, if his primary group and the group of the directory are the same and the directory has at least g+wx permissions. (Standard UNIX permissions, not considering ACLs)

You could solve this by adding an ACL to the directory:

$ setfacl -m default:user:www-data:rwx,default:group:www-data:rwx mediawiki
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