Permission Denied: Fix It Without Root

You are logged in as 'student' — an ordinary account with NO sudo. Your prompt ends in $, not #. Three things in your home directory won't work, and every one is a permission problem you can fix yourself, because you OWN these files. There is no root to call and no sudo to run; the whole point is that owning a file is enough.

1. 'My deploy script won't run.' ~/bin/deploy.sh exists, but ./bin/deploy.sh says 'Permission denied'. Look at its mode.

2. 'I can't even read my own handoff notes.' cat ~/notes/handoff.txt says 'Permission denied' — on a file you own. You cannot read it right now, yet you can still fix it. Why?

3. 'My log file is right there but I can't open it.' ~/logs/service.log exists and is readable, but cat ~/logs/service.log fails. The problem isn't the file — it's the directory in the way.

Diagnose with ls -l and stat, then fix each with chmod. This is the everyday unprivileged-user loop: hit EPERM, read the mode, reason about who you are, fix what you own.