problems editing /etc/fstab

[miki65]

I am trying to edit /etc/fstab and keep being told that I "do not have permission" to save a replacement. I've used the chmod command to enable write access to the file, but gedit still refuses to save it. When I use terminal with the su and gedit commands, I get told that gedit cannot open because of some system nonsense. Please help.

[altair4]

To edit /etc/fstab you need to have elevated privileges:

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gksu gedit /etc/fstab

If you get some kind of error when you do that it's probably because you've been doing things like this:

I am trying to edit /etc/fstab and keep being told that I "do not have permission" to save a replacement. I've used the chmod command to enable write access to the file

My advice is to not mess around with permissions of system files.

[miki65]

Thanks. Since I did

chmod +w /etc/fstab

should I now do

chmod -w /etc/fstab

in order to set things back to normal? Or do I need to do something else?

[karlchen]

Hello, miki65.

Running the command

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chmod +w /etc/fstab

under a normal user account will merely yield an error message (see proof below). Therefore more likely than not you have not changed any file permissions, hence there is no need to revert the failed action.

Proof:

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ls -l /etc/fstab; chmod +w /etc/fstab; ls -l /etc/fstab
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 681 Aug 31 23:36 /etc/fstab
chmod: changing permissions of `/etc/fstab': Operation not permitted
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 681 Aug 31 23:36 /etc/fstab

As much as you cannot simply

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gedit /etc/fstab

from a normal user account and save any changes back to disk, you cannot change the file permissions of /etc/fstab from a normale user account.

Kind regards,
Karl