Can't change permissions on a folder with nautilus.

Confirmed on gutsy. File permissions are applied to files in the directory when the 'Apply permissions to enclosed files' button is pressed, but those permissions are not placed on new files created in the folder.

Added link to potential nautilus related bug in GNOME bugzilla

Normally I never use Nautilus, but I was talking someone through creating permissions on a folder over the phone and we kept getting stuck because I kept telling him to give read/write permissions to the folder, when really what I should have been saying is 'create and delete' which is what it says for the folder permissions in Nautilus.

After Matt confirmed the bug it hit me that this is really a UI design bug. What I would do is take away the 'file permission' drop downs on that properties window and have a button which says 'change permissions on enclosed files'. Then when you click that button, it asks for the three permission drop downs. That would say to me that these permissions are not 'properties' of the folder which is the way it seems now.

For me it's a problem right now - I'm copying all files from an NTFS storage partition to a new ext3 Partition on a new HDD. I found one folder '180 Canon' with photographs inside, no thumnails.
Right clicking gives permissions
'Owner: root
FolderAccess: Create and Delete files
FileAccess: -'

Next 'group: root' and 'others'.

Now logging in to launch 'Rootilus' should mean from this properties dialogue - running with root priviledge, I am the owner and can click the tab to change 'Group: root' to something else - but it changes back to root. NAutilus seems to refuse to write the new permissions to the file - also prevent me from copying/moving or doing anything else as root or as myself !!!!

No change with Karmic?

im having this problem on lucid. From 'Rootilus' i change the permissions tabs and they change back and prevent me from editing the files.

This problem in my case i believe was caused my fstab configuration. After editing it i am now able to modify/run my files although the permissions tab in nautilus has been grayed out now.

I just upgraded from 9.10 (amd64) to 10.04, and then immediately from 10.04 to 10.10. I have this same problem:

When I go to

Places > Home Folder > right-click on Public > Permissions tab

and try to change any of the "File Access" drop-downs, they all immediately revert to "---". I have tried using 'chmod dane:dane /home/dane/Public -R' and 'chown a+rwx /home/dane/Public -R' with no effect. I have also tried running nautilus with 'sudo nautilus /home/dane', and have not been able to change the file permissions. The "Allow executing file as program" box is highlighted (solid orange color), but cannot be checked or un-checked. I will try to attach a screenshot of this.

As a result of this, I think, I am unable to use any nautilus-share functionality that requires a change in permissions, such as "Allow others to create and delete files in this folder" and "Guest access (for people without a user account)". Whenever I try to use such an option, nautilus entirely crashes (desktop icons flicker and then come back, and all folder windows close). I have tried purging (sudo aptitude purge ...) and re-installing samba, samba-common, samba-common-bin, nautilus-share, nautilus-gksu, nautilus-open-terminal, nautilus-sendto, and nautilus-sendto-empathy; as well as purging, killing nautilus (killall nautilus), starting nautilus, and trying to change permissions without reinstalling those packages. None of this has worked.

I have also tried reinstalling (sudo aptitude reinstall ...) nautilus, nautilus-data, nautilus-actions, and nautilus-scripts-manager (then killing and restarting nautilus), but none of this has worked, either.

I have checked my fstab configuration, and my / partition (on which /home/dane resides) does not have any unusual mount options. I'll attach this as well. I would REALLY like to get this functionality back (which I had in 9.10). Any suggestions? Need any more information?

Thanks for your interest in this bug.

P.S. This nautilus permissions problem happens on my ext3 /media/PERSONAL and NTFS WinVista partitions as well.

Hello,
This problem only effected my other non root directory mount spots as well. I did NOT end up fixing the problem completely just seemed to take away the symptom of not being able to execute and move files, i am still unable to change file permissions using nautilus. Its been a while since got it to work again, i don't remember why it worked but i think i added a boot option called umask to my fstab. https://wiki.umiacs.umd.edu/umiacs/index.php/Umask read up more about umask. At first i set umask=000 but apparently that is bad and allows anyone to be able change my folder permissions so now im using umask=022(more secure). Not 100% sure what i did to it so you might have better luck on forums. Here is my fstab for comparison (its been modified so i don't even remember what some of the other stuff is for). good luck.

# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# / was on /dev/sda2 during installation
UUID=216065a9-7ff0-4f0c-b801-45ec4c096d20 / ext3 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=69aba461-d5f3-40a1-8509-813d9252bbae none swap swap 0 1
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /media/sdb1 vfat uid=alex,iocharset=utf8,umask=022,users,user 0 0
/dev/sda3 /media/sda3 ntfs nls=iso8859-1,umask=022 0 0
/dev/sda5 /media/sda5 ntfs nls=iso8859-1,umask=022 0 0

Thanks for posting, alexsimps.

Indeed, I have found the umask=022 option to be very useful on NTFS filesystems in the past. Unfortunately, it's with my '/' partition, which is ext4 that I'm noticing the problem. I haven't been able to change any permissions on my NTFS partition using Nautilus, either, but the real problem is with not being able to change user-owned files on my '/' partition (partitularly in /home/dane/blahblahblah). I don't really need to mess with NTFS permissions in Linux very often, so that's not such a big problem.

I see that this bug was first reported in 2008. Depending on how many people are affected, does anybody think it should be marked as "high" priority? (Not trying to be impatient, but I do think this is quite a problem for the systems/users affected.)

Thanks.

Thanks! :-)

the issue should be fixed with nautilus 3.6 in raring