Question

I recently decided to try to learn some bash scripting and as a fun exercise I decided to make a script to open up a daily file for me to write notes in whenever the script is run.

It worked fine until I logged out and back in to the system later, when I received an error

/usr/local/bin/notes: line 45: /home/MY_USERNAME/notes/2010-10-01:Permission denied

Code

I might be mistaken, but this certainly doesn’t seem like something that shouldn’t require extra permissions, does it?

Editor is set to nano

File’s permissions are -rw-rw-r--

Script’s permissions are -rwxr-xr-x

Answer 1

My guess is that in

$EDITOR $DAILY_FILENAME 

$EDITOR is null, so it’s trying to execute $DAILY_FILENAME which not executable. Probably while you were testing you set EDITOR manually, but didn’t add it to your .bashrc (or whatever) file.

Use the -x option to prove it.