Arch Linux

yoshikart

Member

Registered: 2025-12-18

Posts: 3

Permission denied, but my user group has permission to access

Hello all,

I recently re-installed Arch Linux onto my laptop after deciding I wanted a fresh start.

Now, I want to set my user icon to appear in LightDM. The LightDM wiki page recommends I install AccountsService and store my desired user icon as .face in my home directory. However, this did not work and the default icon persisted.

After some investigation, I have discovered one possible reason as to what is causing this and that is LightDM does not have permission to access /var/lib/AccountsService/users which includes a file for my user pointing to the destination of my user photo. So I set the permissions recursively on the entire /var/lib/AccountsService directory:

sudo chown -R lightdm:lightdm /var/lib/AccountsService
sudo chmod -R 754 /var/lib/AccountsService

Thus giving any user in the lightdm group read and executable permissions on any file/folder in /var/lib/AccountsService.

My user is a member of the lightdm group. However, when I run ls -l /var/lib/AccountsService I get:

ls: cannot access '/var/lib/AccountsService/users': Permission denied
ls: cannot access '/var/lib/AccountsService/icons': Permission denied
total 0
d????????? ? ? ? ?            ? icons
d????????? ? ? ? ?            ? users

Yet when I run it as root:

total 8
drwxr-xr-- 2 lightdm lightdm 4096 Mar  4 11:18 icons
drwxr-xr-- 2 lightdm lightdm 4096 Mar  4 11:21 users

As a member of the lightdm group, I should be able to read this folder.

What is causing this and how can I fix this?

Last edited by yoshikart (Yesterday 11:53:08)

-thc

Member

Registered: 2017-03-15

Posts: 1,095

Re: Permission denied, but my user group has permission to access

One possible explanation: You tried to access the directories immediately after setting the ownership/permission in another shell or via sudo/su.

Group membership access rights will be updated after the next login and/or (I'm not sure) restart of the shell.

dimich

Member

From: Kharkiv, Ukraine

Registered: 2009-11-03

Posts: 493

Re: Permission denied, but my user group has permission to access

As a member of the lightdm group...

Check membership with "id" or "groups" command.

or (I'm not sure) restart of the shell.

Restart of the shell will not work. "newgrp lightdm" should.

-thc

Member

Registered: 2017-03-15

Posts: 1,095

Re: Permission denied, but my user group has permission to access

Restart of the shell will not work. "newgrp lightdm" should.

Good to know - thanks.

yoshikart

Member

Registered: 2025-12-18

Posts: 3

Re: Permission denied, but my user group has permission to access

Logging in again fixed the issue of not having permissions to read files in the AccountsService folder, however the permissions were reset to root every reboot. I switched to SDDM, thinking it was a LightDM issue, only to have the same issue of .face.icon being inaccessible. However, I fixed it using ACL to give the SDDM user permission to access the file:

setfacl -m u:sddm:x ~/
setfacl -m u:sddm:r ~/.face.icon

After this, my avatar displayed in SDDM. I have not tried LightDM but anyone else who stumbles upon this thread can try it, except .face instead of .face.icon and the lightdm user instead of sddm user.

Last edited by yoshikart (Today 12:24:15)