On Sun, Jun 13, 1999 at 06:14:45PM -0400, Jonathan D. Proulx wrote: > Hi, > > I recently moved /var to the partition windoze used to occupy. > > To do this (after reformatting the partition): > # mkdir /vartemp > # mount /dev/hda1 -t ext2 /vartemp > # cp -R /var/* /vartemp > > I then set up /etc/fstab to mount /dev/hda1 at /var and later wiped the > original /var. It has been a little while so I'm not 100% on exactly what I > did. > > The problem is that only root can write to /var or any subdirectories. So > users cannot use `man` and there are other miscellaneous errors. > > I thought this should work: > drwxr-xr-x 18 root root 1024 May 10 16:21 var > > But it doesn't: > $ man test > Reformatting test(1), please wait... > man: can't create /var/catman/cat1/4071: Permission denied
It looks like you should have cp -a (same as -dpR?) to preserve the permissions for the subdirectories of /var. Consider this: bart:~$ ls -ld /var drwxr-xr-x 19 root root 1024 May 15 23:24 /var bart:~$ ls -ld /var/catman drwxr-sr-x 12 man root 1024 Jun 13 06:53 /var/catman bart:~$ -- Ray
