Hello Managers,
First off, I'd like to thank Alan Davis, Calvin Coghlan, Anthony A. D.
Talltree, sysadmin_at_astro.su.se, and David Henden for their suggestions.
Almost everyone suggested that I check the permissions on the directory,
because emacs drops in a backup *~ file into the directory. I had
neglected to mention in my original post that the directory was already
set to 775, and owned by the owner of the file in question. That owner
and the programmer wanting to modify the file was in the same group
(users). I think that Alan Davis had the correct reason:
[Davis, Alan wrote]
> Check to see if the file is being managed by RCS. Emacs is RCS aware and the
> RCS status will over-ride the filesystem permissions.
I asked the programmer if the file was managed by RCS and it was by
managed CVS. Although I don't understand why I was able to modify the
file as non-root. My original post follows.
Thanks,
Kevin
[original post]
> This isn't totally Tru64 specific, but it might be a strange permissions
> issue. A programmer came up to me and told me he couldn't edit a file
> owned by someone else even though the permission bits were set to 777.
> I checked it, permissions were 777, the two users are in the same group
> (users).
>
> I (as non-root) was able to edit the file and save it. The programmer
> was able to edit it with vi but not emacs. So I believe it's more of an
> emacs problem. He was able to create in that directory with emacs, but
> not able to edit any of the existing ones. Emacs only gave the error
> about "read-only buffer". The problem was fixed by chown'ing the file to
> the programmer, but I'd still like to get an idea what is going on.
>
> Emacs version 20.4.2
> Tru64 4.0f on DS20.
--
Kevin Dea
UNIX System Administrator
Alpine Electronics Research of America
Received on Wed Mar 28 2001 - 21:26:47 NZST