Question

I was trying out a very small script

#!/bin/sh

test="$(/home/dell/case3.3/private.key)"

echo $test

I call this file test1.sh

I try to access a file named private.key
Here is the permission set for the file private.key
-rw-rw-r--

Here is the permission set for the file test1.sh
-rwxrwxrwx

I have also tried to do

chmod u+x test1.sh

and

chmod 755 test1.sh

In my agony, I also tried
chmod 777 test1.sh

I believe that 777 should give it all the permissions like it did ..

I don’t understand what the problem is, why is there a permission denied

I act as the super user

Answer 1

/home/dell/case3.3/private.key is not a script, and not executable. $(/home/dell/case3.3/private.key) tries to execute that file. It’s unclear what you’re trying to do, but perhaps what you want is:

test="$(cat /home/dell/case3.3/private.key)"
echo "$test"

---

^{Edit in response to OP’s comments}

You don’t need to save a whole file to a variable in order to simply display its contents. Instead, use:

cat /home/dell/case3.3/private.key

If, however, you do want to save off some part of the file, use sed, grep, or awk. For example

test="$(grep 'somethingInTheFile' /home/dell/case3.3/private.key)"
echo "$test"

Or, you could process the file line by line:

while read line; do
  echo $line
done < /home/dell/case3.3/private.key