Permission Denied when editing .bash_profile

Question

I'm still learning the CLI and the ins and outs of it, especially this .bash_profile. I feel overwhelmed with what I'm learning about this.

Anyways, I can access .bash_profile. If I do nano ~/.bash_profile then the file appears and I'm free to edit. And then I tried addingin the line I'm supposed to include:

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH"

However, when I try to save the file (or whatever .bash_profile is), I get the following error: [ Error writing /home/myname.bash_profile Permission denied ]

Answer 1

While you can do sudo nano ~/.bash_profile to edit the file, I feel like it's a bit weird that your .bash_profile needs root to be modified.

If you try ls -la ~ | grep bash

-rw-------    1 Greg  staff    8622 27 Jun 16:06 .bash_history
-rw-r--r--    1 Greg  staff    2189 28 Jun 01:24 .bash_profile

You see my .bash_profile is owned by me, Greg, not root. I think you'll find that when you do this, your .bash_profile will be owned by root. This means that when you want to edit the file, you need to use sudo, but I don't.

If you don't want to have to use sudo all the time to modify this file, you can change the owner of the file sudo chown yourusername ~/.bash_profile

Now if you run the ls command I showed above, you should see your name as the owner of the file, instead of root.