hi guys i know linux is designed that non root users cant have access to certain folder in file system

my easy way to access is temporarily login as root ( or nautilus open as root )

but then if IDE like eclipse trying to write data to restricted folder in file system it wont allow

is there any way to include my user account as root forever?

i know it is not safe for security purpose but it is not very convenient for me to have this kind of restriction.

Which directories do you need eclipse to write to, and why?

The "proper" way of doing this if you for example were using eclipse
for some web-related task to make /var/www/htdocs/yoursite owned by
a group that you're a member of, and chmod it to be group writable,
not to make you root on a permanent basis.


Cheers,
Tink

You are looking at the problem through the wrong lenses. I'll answer nonetheless.

Read on chmod and chown to set the permissions and the owner:group for a given file. They both can use -R for recursive operation. Be aware that directories need +x to allow access. Be also aware that massively changing permissions and/or ownership of system files and directories can (and eventually WILL) break your installation, to the point of rendering it unusable, requiring a re-installation to fix it.

As it's meant to be.

If you are using Eclipse that way you are really doing it the wrong way. There's no reason to use such a program as root. At all.

Use root all the time? "At your own risk (TM)".

Why? As I said above, I think you are just looking at the problem from the wrong angle. I am pretty sure there's a proper solution to your "problem" that doesn't require such hackish stuff. If you truly want that, I'd choose another OS. It will be far less traumatic.

Change ownership to your user, run the application as root (or gnome/kde sudo), change permissions to less restrictive, add yourself to the group of the directory/files.
or
or
There are a lot of ways to accomplish what you want to do, it just depends on what your criteria are for the specific task.

It would also depend on what you mean by "linux is designed that non root users cant have access to certain folder in file system", which is pretty much untrue. The default permissions are not the permanent permissions and almost all permissions can be changed with very few exceptions.

Although a bad idea you could change your users id to roots and then you and root are the same effective user... but this is a 'bad plan(tm)'. You could also just login and run as root, but again, this is a bad plan.

It would help tremendously to have considerably more details.

yah thanks guys i understand what you mean i guess i would have to digg in more with chmod groups and users thing...i was just trying to set up eclipse with php running on lampp ( xampp linux ) on /opt/lampp/ but found that eclipse wasn't able to write files to htdocs. i did it eventually . but um i need to study more about chmod operations as i don't remember them and barely use them

thanks

Man pages are all you need really, no need to memorise or study, just look it up on the fly

The short short chmod primer is -

chmod flags group+perm or chmod flags group-perm.

group where..
u - owner
g - group
o - everyone else
a - all 3 above

permission where...
r - read
w - write
x - execute

flags where...
-R - recursive

In reality you probably want to chown it to the webserver user and add yourself to that group.

When dealing with permissions you always have to set the absolute minimum that you'll need to operate. You certainly don't need god-like powers (root) to do this. Not at all.

You can set separate read, write and exec permissions for the owner, the group and "the rest". All you need to do is to assign htdocs and everything under to a given group, then add yourself to that group. Give the files +r and +w for the group, for dirs you will also need to enable +x.

Using complex GUIs like eclipse as root is a recipe for disaster.

1 members found this post helpful.

I agree, a simple slip up or bad interaction between you and gui could cause catastrophic damage to the system if its running as root. There are a ton of solutions far better than that one.