Shell Programming and Scripting

OK. Now that you're back to a sane starting point, since ls doesn't show that any extended security controls are in use on these directories, the following should loosen security controls enough to allow everybody to read /var/log/iptraf/tcp_udp_services-eth0.log:

Code:

chmod 755 /var/log/iptraf

I will take your word for it that you know how to safely handle security issues. In you first message you said that you didn't know who was running the script that is doesn't have permission to read this log file (so you added a call to whoami to see who it was). The fact that it showed that it was being executed by user-ID nobody means that it was likely started by a request from a remote system. You are changing the system's security features so that anyone on the same network as this server can read any log file in that directory. I'm not familiar with the iptraf application, but IP traffic being logged on a server need not originate on that server. Just because you're the only one who logs on to that server doesn't mean that IP traffic can't contain data from other users, and doesn't mean that users on other systems on your network won't be able to read sensitive information from log files in that directory.

Thanks, it works

By who running the script, I meant I do not know what linux process, not what physical user....