I encountered a very strange situation with a bunch of directories:
user1$ ls -l example/
ls: cannot access 'example/a.txt': Permission denied
ls: cannot access 'example/b.txt': Permission denied
total 0
-????????? ? ? ? ? ? a.txt
-????????? ? ? ? ? ? b.txt
user1$ sudo ls -l example/
total 12345
drw-rwxr-x 2 user1 user1 4096 Jul 7 2018 ./
drwxrwxr-x 7 user1 user1 54321 Dec 14 12:15 ../
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user1 user1 2444333 Mar 17 2018 a.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user1 user1 1333222 Mar 17 2018 b.txt
With sudo, I can read the files successfully, change the permissions, etc. Without it, there is no way I can access those files. I tried to sudo chown user1:user1 the files, as well as sudo chmod a+r them: the commands succeed, but nothing changes.
What could possibly have happened to those files? How do I make it possible to access them?
ls -ld example– A.B Dec 14 '20 at 11:46drw-- no execute permission for the directory for youruser1. – muru Dec 14 '20 at 11:49