gcloud command changes ownership of the current directory

Question

I'm performing usual operation of fetching kubernetes cluster credentials from GCP. The gcloud command doesn't fetch the credentials and surprisingly updates the ownership of the local directory:

~/tmp/1> ls
~/tmp/1> gcloud container clusters get-credentials production-ng
Fetching cluster endpoint and auth data.
ERROR: (gcloud.container.clusters.get-credentials) Unable to write file [/home/vladimir/tmp/1]: [Errno 21] Is a directory: '/home/vladimir/tmp/1'

~/tmp/1> ls
ls: cannot open directory '.': Permission denied

Other commands, like gcloud container clusters list work fine. I've tried to reinstall the gcloud.

Answer 1

This happens if your KUBECONFIG has an empty entry, like :/Users/acme/.kube/config gcloud resolves the empty value as the current directory, changes permissions and tries to write to it

Reported at https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/143911217

Answer 2

It happened to be a problem with kubectl. Reinstalling it solved this strange issue.

If you, like me, have stuck with strange gcloud behavior, following points could help to track an issue:

• Checking alias command and if it's really pointing to the intended binary;
• Launch separate docker container with gsutil and feed it your config files. If the gcloud container clusters get-credentials ... runs smoothly there, than it's the problem with binaries (not configuration):

docker run -it \
       -v $HOME/.config:/root/.config \
       -v $HOME/.kube:/root/.kube google/cloud-sdk:217.0.0-alpine sh

• Problem with binary can be solved just by reinstalling/updating;
• If it's a problem with configs, then you could back them up and reinstall kubectl / gsutil from scratch using not just apt-get remove ..., but apt-get purge .... Be aware: purge removes config files!

Hope this would help somebody else.