Re: st: Updating Stata on a Unix box without logging in as root

[Ulrich Kohler <kohler@wzb.eu>]

Am Dienstag, den 05.10.2010, 21:56 -0300 schrieb Tiago V. Pereira:
> Just change the  the ownership of the Stata files and directories
> recursively.
> 
> Assuming that the Stata's directory is found on the path:
> 
> /usr/local/stata11/
> 
> 
> type:
> 
> sudo chmod -R 777 /usr/local/stata11/
> 
> Once you exit, you will be able to update Stata using xstata without
> needing to log as root.
> 
> In any case, you will need to log as root once to change the permissions.
> 
> Ulrich's approach does exactly the same task.

This is much nicer than my solution using "find". I use "find" so often
that I never realized the existance of the "-R" switch of chmod and
chown ...

Yet there are two differences worth noting: (1) You give the right to
update to all users, while I gave that right to a particular non-root
user. If  there is only one person using the computer this is the same.
However, if more persons using the computer the decision between 

$ sudo chmod -R 777 /usr/local/stata11/
$ sudo chown -R <username> /usr/local/stata11/

becomes crucial. 

(2) Another issue is that "chmod 777" changes all files to being
executable, including the help-files and ado-files. This has some side
effects. One is, that Nautilus (a file managing application) asks
whether these file should be opened or executed when clicking on the
filename. Another is that all file names appear in the same color when
listing them in a shell. 

Uli





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