[hardy] nano Error reading ~/.nano_history: Permission denied

[Caroline Ford]

Binary package hint: nano

secret@celery:/etc/X11$ nano xorg.conf

Error reading /home/secret/.nano_history: Permission denied

Press Enter to continue starting nano.

Then nano starts as normal. It happens every time.

nano 2.0.7-1

Looking at the perms of ./nano_history only root has read access.

[Risto H. Kurppa (risto.kurppa)]

Confirmed on Gutsy:

kurppa@lanka:~/.unison$ nano datat.prf

Virhe luettaessa tiedostoa /home/kurppa/.nano_history: Permission denied

Press Enter to continue starting nano.

kurppa@lanka:~/.unison$

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

I still have this in Hardy beta.

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

I'll see if I can patch this.

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=204307 is a mention of this bug going back to 06.

[Markus Korn (thekorn)]

I can confirm this in hardy (version of nano: 2.0.7-1ubuntu1)

Steps to reproduce this:
$ cd ~
$ rm .nano-history
$ sudo nano

enter some text, then search for some text (^W) and add this text to the search history (^P). Then close nano.

Now a .nano-history is created in the users home-dir:
$ ls -all .nano*
-rw------- 1 root root 6 2008-04-14 19:20 .nano_history

Starting without superuser-rights reproduces this bug
$ nano

Fehler beim Lesen von /home/markus/.nano_history: Permission denied

Drücken Sie die Eingabetaste, um mit dem Starten von nano fortzufahren.

Markus

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

Bug #11242 is the same issue, which was marked as invalid.

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

Unassigning from me as it's not a simple fix, and looks like it would be a controversial one.

[Fansana (ageofi95)]

to fix this you just have to:

$ chmod currentUser:currentUser ~/.nano_history

if the error persists try:

$ sudo chmod o+rw ~/.nano_history
that way nano can read the file no matter who the owner is.