Ubuntu

chmod 600 changed type of file to binary

Asked by gbonline

Hi, I'm following the instructions to install nginx and passenger on my ubuntu/unity 13.10 x86_64 machine as indicated on phusion site.
Then I need to create a file passenger.list into /etc/apt/sources.list.d and I do it with sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/passenger.list

The file I create on nautilus is showed as text file!
After in the instructions, I need to do the commands
$ sudo chown root: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/passenger.list
$ sudo chmod 600 /etc/apt/sources.list.d/passenger.list

and after the last command on nautilus, I see that the file is a binary file!

this kind of file 'binary' cause an error when i need to use the apt as
WARNING:root:could not open file '/etc/apt/sources.list.d/passenger.list'

chmod doesn't change the file type, right?
G.

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This question was originally filed as bug #1279082.

Revision history for this message
John Kim (kotux) said : 		#1

It wants to confirm that chown doesn't change filetypes.

Revision history for this message
Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty (hamishmb) said : 		#2

chmod 600 makes a file accessable to only root. The default when nautilus can't read the contents of a file is to declare it as binary. chown root:root has the same affect. Your file type hasn't changed nautilus just can't fead it.

Hamish

Revision history for this message
gbonline (gbonline-6) said : 		#3

Thanks for the replay, I understand now that the file type isn't involved in the error.
But what about the Warning on accessing files used by apt?
If i call a sudo apt-get update I get the error that some problems occours

All the files in sources.list.d folder and sub, are owned by root, so if on ny new passenger.list file I change the owner that should not provoke a warning.
I submitted this as bug because the same installation on debian 7 desktop has been done without any errors/warning.

To resolve the issue now I didn't changed the the mod on that file.

Revision history for this message
Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#4

What is the output of
ls -l /etc/apt/sources.list
ls -l /etc/apt/sources.list.d

The additional source list files on my system are protected -rw-r--r--
So I recommend
sudo chmod 644 /etc/apt/sources.list.d/passenger.list

(I do not see any security implication by showing the sources where you download programs, as long as there is no write access to these files for ordinary users.)

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