I often find that, when I'm confronted with a filesystem access failure, during that lovely "wtf?" moment, I often mutter (and type) `pathlld` (a `bash` script) $ pathlld -h pathlld [-f] [-h] [-l] [-m] <file> ... pathlld: Use /bin/ls -ld to show permissions and ownerships for pathlld: each directory in the path for <file>. pathlld: -f Process nonexistent <file>s, to pathlld: see existing parts of path to <file>. pathlld: -l If a path component is a soft-link, do /bin/ls -Lld, too. pathlld: -m Show mount info for any path component. pathlld: that is a mountpoint. pathlld: -v Turn on verbose output to STDERR. pathlld: -h This help. E.g., $ pathlld -m -l $(type -p vim) drwxr-xr-x 27 root root 4096 Aug 21 20:03 / /dev/sda5 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro) drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 Jan 4 2015 /usr drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 151552 Aug 25 10:08 /usr/bin lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 Jan 23 2013 /usr/bin/vim -> /etc/alternatives/vim -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2580984 Jan 2 2014 /usr/bin/vim $ pathlld -m -l mnt/CLIPZIP/PODCASTS/ drwx------ 11 w3 walt 4096 May 21 00:21 mnt drwxr-xr-x 12 w3 walt 32768 Dec 31 1969 mnt/CLIPZIP /dev/sdb on /home/w3/mnt/CLIPZIP type vfat (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,uid=1003,gid=1000) drwxr-xr-x 37 w3 walt 32768 Aug 25 14:07 mnt/CLIPZIP/PODCASTS I would like to publish this tool. Can I do it via AskUbuntu? I finally published it via github! GitHub repositories: https://github.com/waltinator/pathlld.git - Bash script to answer "Why can't I read/write that file?" https://github.com/waltinator/net-o-matic.git - Watch for (WiFi) network going down, then do a user-specified thing to fix it.