`ls` says the group…
I wanted a second local account to read /home/davidw. The user was already in group davidw, and ls looked like it should just work: $ ls -ld /home/davidw drwxrwx---+ 272 davidw davidw 16384 Aug 19 16:56 /home/davidw Group davidw has rwx, right there in the middle. Except every access failed: $ sudo -u desk ls /home/davidw ls: cannot open directory '/home/davidw': Permission denied The + at the end of the mode string is the tell. Once a file has a POSIX ACL, the middle triad printed by ls stops being the group permission and becomes the ACL mask — a ceiling on what every named user, named group, and the owning group may get. The real group entry is only visible via getfacl: $ getfacl -p /home/davidw user::rwx user:libvirt-qemu:--x group::--- <-- the actual group permission: nothing mask::rwx <-- this is what ls printed as "rwx" other::--- So the directory was 700 all along. Someone (libvirt, in my case) added user:libvirt-qemu:--x at some point, and adding any named…