ACL, ls, "permission denied" and a lot of questionmarks

Question

I have two users, Alice and Bob. Bob should be allowed to list, ls, Alice's home directory. Alice also has a file in her home directory that Bob should also be allowed to read.

I run these commands as root:

[root@corvatsch ~]# setfacl -m user:bob:r /home/alice/
[root@corvatsch ~]# setfacl -m user:bob:r /home/alice/file

This yields the following result in the ACLs:

[root@corvatsch ~]# getfacl -c /home/alice/
user::rwx
user:bob:r--
group::---
mask::r--
other::---

and

[root@corvatsch ~]# getfacl -c /home/alice/file
getfacl: Removing leading '/' from absolute path names
user::rw-
user:bob:r--
group::r--
mask::r--
other::r--

It looks as if Bob should now be able to read Alice's home folder as well as the content of the her file.

When Bob tries that, he gets:

[bob@corvatsch ~]$ ls -l /home/alice/
ls: cannot access /home/alice/file: Permission denied
total 0
-????????? ? ? ? ?            ? file

(Note the questionmarks!) and

[bob@corvatsch ~]$ cat /home/alice/file
cat: /home/alice/file: Permission denied

Looks like Bob can read the home directory, although in a weird way. Ls lists the file but seems to have problems with the ACLs?

And cating the file seems to not work at all.

Can somebody explain what i am missing?

NOTE: (I'm running CentOS 6.4)

Answer 1

The /home/alice/ directory needs executable access for the user accessing it.

EDIT: BTW, the question marks are there to indicate that ls can't get the permissions on the file.