Ubuntu – You do not have the permissions necessary to view the contents of “folder”

dual-bootpermissions

I had Windows installed before and I downloaded some files while using it.Then I installed Backtrack 5 R3 as dual boot and copied the files on windows to BT when BT was booted, and it was successful. (Also I always logged in as root on BT) Then I deleted Windows and installed Ubuntu 14.04 as dual boot and copied the files on BT to Ubuntu.

The problem is that when I want to open or access the files on Ubuntu when Ubuntu is booted, i can't; I get the error message

You do not have the permissions necessary to view the contents of “files”

I can however use the ls command with sudo to sudo ls files but can't use cd; when I try I get sudo: cd: command not found.

The way I found that worked was to log in as root on terminal and open/access the files that way. But it wasn't efficient; I still couldn't open the files via graphical file manager. Then I looked it up on many threads and only thing i found that worked was sudo chmod go+rx files but the problem with this is that it makes only the files folder accessible, not the subfolders, and if I try using the same command to the subfolders one by one it works but I've got hundreds of subfolders which also have subfolders in them.

So I'm asking if there's a more practical way of doing it.

Best Answer

Just add the -R option to recursively change all the permissions of each files and directories under a specified directory. An example, recursively add read and write permissions for the owner and group on foldername:

sudo chmod -R ug+rw foldername

Read more about permissions ...

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Can you bypass filesystem permissions

Ubuntu does not mount your real hard disk but you should be able to copy your data to an external hard easily enough.

First Boot from the USB and select try Ubuntu

I'm using the 12.04 CD to do this

Now press Ctrl+Alt+T to open a termininal

In the terminal enter the following command

sudo -i

Then

nautilus

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This opens nautilus (the file manager) as root. Do not close the terminal.

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Note: In the section down the left hand side of nautilus "File System" is the virtual file system of the live session not a real file system you real hard drives are shown as devices. In my case the device was "959cf23..."

As you are root you can now copy and paste any data you want to keep to external storage.

You can change ownership and permissions of the files by selecting properties enter image description here

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Alternatively don't worry about permissions for now as you can always change the permissions again from the other OS or you can make them all accessible to every one with

sudo chmod -R 777 /path/to/external/drive

Replacing /path/to/external/drive with the correct path. Warning: Make sure you type this correcly as sudo chmod -R 777 / path/to/external/drive for example will change permissions for the entire file system.

Then you can re-install the OS you want and restore your data from the backup.

Ubuntu – Copying Folder while Preserving Permissions/Ownership Error: operation not permitted

FAT32 (or any FAT-type filesystem for that matter) does not support permissions. Any file copied to a FAT filesystem will appear with default owner/group/mode attributes, depending on how the filesystem was mounted.

If you need to preserve these attributes, use a different filesystem. Most (if not all) Unix filesystems (ext*, ReiserFS, btrfs and a bunch of others) supported by Linux will work, so will NTFS to an extent (not strictly a Unix filesystem but designed with a certain degree of Unix compatibility in mind).

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