cannot view partition through nautilus

Question

I'm trying to view access files from another partition on my fedora 17 box, but it says "The folder contents could not be displayed. You do not have the permissions necessary to view the contents of "alex"".

I'm running nautilus on Fedora 17 in an account with the same user name and password that owns the files from the other partition, which probably doesn't mean anything. How would I give myself permission to view my own files on the other partition?

Alex

Answer 1

Alex,

Files are stored on your file system and are pointed to by inodes. Inodes contain file metadata such as access controls, creation/modification/access time, and its user ID.

When you list files with commands like ls or stat, they map the UID to a username using /etc/passwd as the key. You can tell them to not resolve UID->username by ls -n $file or stat -c %u $file.

If you type id, you'll see the current UID under which you're operating. If the UID of the files on the other partition is different than your current UID, you'll see this problem. If you have root access, you can change the ownership of the files to be your regular user's UID (man chown), the UID located in your current operating system's /etc/passwd file. Then you should be able to access the files as your regular user.

That is, if your problem is a UID mismatch :)