Permission denied on some shared libraries

Question

First of all, I hope this is the right site to be posting this to.

I get these errors when logging in as another user (ignatius):

catch22bbs:~/Desktop # su ignatius
ls: error while loading shared libraries: libpcre.so.1: cannot open shared object file: Permission denied

And, also when running certain programs. Most of them don't work.

ignatius@catch22bbs:~> pico
pico: error while loading shared libraries: libmagic.so.1: cannot open shared object file: Permission denied

Here's the strange part:

catch22bbs:~ # l /usr/lib/libpcre.so*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     16 Jun 29 06:04 /usr/lib/libpcre.so -> libpcre.so.1.2.7*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     16 Jun 29 06:04 /usr/lib/libpcre.so.1 -> libpcre.so.1.2.7*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 488800 Jun 29 06:04 /usr/lib/libpcre.so.1.2.7*

And..

catch22bbs:~ # l /usr/lib/libmagic*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     17 Mar 14 05:53 /usr/lib/libmagic.so.1 -> libmagic.so.1.0.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 137032 Mar 14 05:55 /usr/lib/libmagic.so.1.0.0

I'm running openSuSE Tumbleweed. I've never had this problem in the past. I'm not sure what the problem is.

Answer 1

Barring something really obscure with your account, it's most likely that you modified some part of the directory permissions so that only root can access it. There's been a couple of questions recently which amounted to having broken the system by doing

chmod 700 /

which can be repaired by doing

chmod 755 /

(both running as root, of course). Besides the / level, your system directories may have incorrect permissions on /usr/bin, /usr/lib (both should be 0755).