Accessing restrected files

**triunenature** · May 5th, 2009

So, some background.

I created a second user and named it guest. gave it no password by doing a little trick i read about.

Anyway... that all went dandy, however out of courisoity, i was trying to see what i could do in the guest account.

So i restrected access to /home/guest via the guest account (right clicked the file and made it where only guest could access it)

Then i went to my main account, and was trying to see how to use my admistrative abilitys

I went to the file and double clicked it... access restrected. (ok... well at least this will be fun)

Terminal ->

Code:

CD /home/guest
Permission denied.

Ok... well i know how to fix that

Code:

sudo cd /home/guest
sudo: cd: command not found

Well now im stuck... How does the administrator access restrected files? (I mean i could always log back into guest and unrestrect them, but thats no fun)

**Masuran** · May 5th, 2009

The command 'sudo cd /home/guest' won't work because 'cd' isn't a command, it's a builtin command of Bash, the shell.

To get around to this you should do 'sudo -i' to become root and then 'cd /home/guest'. Just don't forget to do 'exit' after you are done doing whatever you do to become a regular user again.

If you don't want to become root you always do 'sudo ls /home/guest' to take a peek inside the directory.

**bodhi.zazen** · May 6th, 2009

use

Code:

sudo bash -c "builtin cd /"

Note this will not do much of anything as bash will cd , then exit.

You can see it works if you execute a command

[quote]~$ sudo bash -c "builtin cd / ; ls "
bin dev initrd.img lib32 media proc selinux tmp vmlinuz
boot etc initrd.img.old lib64 mnt root srv usr vmlinuz.old
cdrom home lib lost+found opt sbin sys var

~$[/code]

Which of course can be accomplished with

Code: