UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I'm the root user on my computer, but I'm writing a script that does a lot of file handling. Every time I create a file or directory it automatically requires root privileges. Is there a way I can just create a file that the user can access without a password?

For example in my script I write

Code:

$ unzip test.zip
$ ls -l
-rw-r--r--   root   root   text.zip 
-rw-r--r--   root   root   test1.txt
-rw-r--r--   root   root   test2.txt
-rw-r--r--   root   root   test3.txt

How do I unzip test.zip to user friendly permissions?

Thanks

Moderator's Comments:

Please use next time code tags for your code and data

First off, you just discovered one of dozens of reasons not to do everything on your desktop unix as root.

Code:

chmod 775 test.zip
su - someuser   # become some other user
unzip test.zip
exit  # go back to being root

make sure someuser has permissions to the destination directory so it can actually write files using unzip.

unzip -X will keep ownership and permssions, no "-X" allows the new user to create the files as the owner.

I'm not trying to do everything in root. The directory I'm working in is user friendly, but in my script I download a file from a website and it immediately puts root permissions on the file. Is there a way around this? Maybe if I try downloading the zip with the chmod 775 command you gave above I won't have to the root issues. I'll give it a shot. Thanks for the response.

How can it put root permission on a file if you are not root?

I think you still have not learned what my collegue tried to tell you:

It is dead simple:

Do not work or use root account except for administration purpose...

When you download I am sure you were root...

How can I tell if I'm in root?

What user did you log in as? If you logged in as root, you're root. sudo also runs things as root.

I'm logged in as diltsjr@diltsjr. Maybe I ran the script with a sudo command and that's why it downloaded the file as root.