Question

So I’m very new to this and I’m trying to create a database using sqlite (with the instructions in their documentation). I get this error after the first line of code. Does anyone know what’s going on?

I’m using terminal on OS X Lion.

$ sqlite3 ex1.db
SQLite version 3.7.5
Enter ".help" for instructions
Enter SQL statements terminated with a ";"
sqlite> create table tb11(one varchar(10), two smallint);
Error: unable to open database "ex1.db": unable to open database file

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Most obvious thing would be lack of permission to write to your current working directory. This is the exact error message I get in that case (too bad it doesn’t bother to include useful information like “permission denied”)

If you have access to strace, then you can confirm like this:

$ strace -f sqlite3 ex1.db 'create table tb11(one varchar(10), two smallint);' 2>&1 | grep ex1.db
execve("/usr/bin/sqlite3", ["sqlite3", "ex1.db", "create table tb11(one varchar(10"...], [/* 58 vars */]) = 0
access("ex1.db", F_OK)                  = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
stat("/tmp/d/ex1.db", 0x7fffb18fc690)   = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/tmp/d/ex1.db", O_RDWR|O_CREAT, 0644) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
open("/tmp/d/ex1.db", O_RDONLY)         = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
write(2, "Error: unable to open database \""..., 70Error: unable to open database "ex1.db": unable to open database file

Notice the result of open is EACCESS (Permission denied).