Permission Denied Issue

I am trying give USER2 access to one of USER1’s folders and everything beneath it. I am unable to access the “exe” directory shown below:

I am able to browse to the “exe” folder as root and as USER1. It seems to be linked based on the “exe → …/exe/linuxx86_64/hdb” description after running the “ls -l” command. I am unsure what the yellow font with red background indicates.

I am running the following to give USER2 permissions to USER1 directories/files:

setfacl -R -m u:user2:rwx /path/of/user1

When I run getfacl /path/of/user1/exe, the permission show as properly added:

servername/path/of/user1/# getfacl /path/of/user1/exe
getfacl: Removing leading ‘/’ from absolute path names

file: /path/of/user1/exe

owner: user1

group: group1

user::r-x
user:user2:rwx
group::r-x
mask::rwx
other::—

As USER2, when I run “cd /path/of/user1/exe” I get the following error:
-bash: cd: exe: Permission denied

Any ideas on how to give USER2, rwx access to /path/of/user1/exe?

Wildly guessing, I’d bet you did not grant enough permissions higher in
the directory structure. Just because you have rights at
/some/deep/level/here does not mean you can ever get to that level if you
lack rights at /some/deep/level or /some/deep or /some so be sure that you
have granted at least execute rights at those levels since ‘x’ on a
directory is what lets the user go into that level. A symlink with a lot
of red usually means a broken link; that does not necessarily mean it is
really broken, but if the current user’s shell cannot see the target
(including for permissions reasons above the target) then it will probably
still show as broken, as technically it is.


Good luck.

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I figured it out. The symlink points to another directory and I used setfacl to apply the permissions to that directory too. That resolved the issue!