Question

i’m doing a dir listing in my .ssh home dir which gives me a strange result:

ls -lsa .ssh/ total 0 ? ?--------- ? ? ? ?            ? . · ? ?--------- ? ? ? ?            ? .. · ? ?--------- ? ? ? ?            ? authorized_keys · 

The weird thing is, that this only happens for one user and only in this specific directory. If I do the ls after a su -l, everything works as expected. Another strange thing is, that my xterm shows the dir listing in a red blinking font! Any ideas what’s causing this to happen?

thx!

Edit:
Here is the dir listing as root:

ls -lsa total 52 4 drw-------  2 sdd sdd 4096 Feb 10 15:57 . 4 drwx------ 16 sdd sdd 4096 Feb 10 15:57 .. 4 -rw-------  1 sdd sdd 1628 Feb 10 15:57 authorized_keys 

I’m using ext3.

Edit2:
Thx for the answers, but i still get this:

chmod -R 600 /home/sdd/.ssh ls -lsan _ssh.old/ total 0 ? ?--------- ? ? ? ?            ? . ? ?--------- ? ? ? ?            ? .. ? ?--------- ? ? ? ?            ? authorized_keys 

Answer 1

That happens when the user can’t do a stat() on the files (which requires execute permissions), but can read the directory entries (which requires read access on the directory). So you get a list of files in the directory, but can’t get any information on the files because they can’t be read. 🙂 If you have a directory which has read permission but not execute, you’ll see this. Someone probably tried to protect the .ssh directory incorrectly – it should be ‘chmod 0700 .ssh/’ and owned by the user which owns the homedir. More than likely, someone was following instructions for securing a .ssh file but applied it to a .ssh directory. 🙂

If you do a chmod 0600 or 0400 on any directory, you can easily reproduce this behavior. Add execute permission to the dir, and it’ll work fine.