Locked Folder ???

Ok so i transfered all of my D&D pdf's to ubuntu and they all work flawlessly (yes i know i play D&D...sue me)

But for some reason the folder has a padlock on the upper right hand side of it and it wont allow me to move the folder's location(or any of the folder contents) or delete the folder (or any of the contents)

And for the life of me i cant figure out how to "unlock" it.

Any help would be great

K_M

 

You lack ownership and write privileges on it.. that's why you're getting the padlock. The easiest way to do it is to open a root terminal window and run chown -R yourusername foldername on it to make yourself the owner.

 

But permissions can also be the issue...ownership sometimes doesnt mean you have permissions to access it.

Code:

sudo chmod 777 <folder>

 

You don't want to use chmod 777 which gives read-write-execute permissions to everybody on the system. You want 664 which gives read-write permissions to owner and group, and read only permissions to all users. You don't need execute because they are PDF's, which aren't executable files.

Do this:

Code:

chown -R yourusername:yourusername foldername
cd foldername
chmod 775 *
chmod 644 *.*

And repeat for sub folders.

Don't use chmod -R becuase you still want your folders to have execute permissions or else you cant cd into them.

If it still doesn't work, then do ls -l folder and post the output here.

 

chmod 777 is VERY dangerous. You should never use it. I've seen people hose systems doing it, because many system-level apps will check to make sure permissions are tight enough before they'll start up.

It's much better to just change the permissions like such:

Code:

sudo chown -R `whoami`:`groups|awk '{ print $1 }'` FILENAME

Where you replace FILENAME with the file or folder you want to change the ownership of. This will change the ownership and group to whoever is running the sudo command and their default group, and will change every file under the directory (or just the file, if that's all it is) and do NOTHING to the permissions. Which is generally what you want.

 

Thanks all. This worked great. Allowed me to unlock the permissions and get the folder where i wanted it to go.

(sorry about the late thanks...had to get back from work)