Permission denied while deleting project

Troubleshooting
1

Hi,

I have some old projects old projects from CS which are occupying whole lot of space on HDD. The CS I’m using now is new installation and I want to remove the old project directories from my HDD.
However, when I try to use rm -rf P38' or 'sudo rm -rf P38 in every case it shows me the following error:
`
rm: cannot remove ‘P38/project.json’: Permission denied

rm: cannot remove ‘P38/workspaces.json’: Permission denied

rm: cannot remove ‘P38/J1/gridfs_data/gridfsdata_0’: Permission denied

rm: cannot remove ‘P38/J1/events.bson’: Permission denied

rm: cannot remove ‘P38/J1/job.json’: Permission denied

rm: cannot remove ‘P38/J1/job.log’: Permission denied
....
....
....

`

How am I supposed to delete old projects from HDD and all files inside those directories (they are not open in any CS now) ?
Please suggest.
Thank you.

2

Hi @diffracteD, can you please check that your user account has read/write/delete permissions for those directories?

3

Standard disclaimer: I’m no expert, so any advice I have may be unhelpful, wrong, misguided or otherwise a bad idea.

I believe you are trying to delete the folders from a shell on the workstation, and not from within the cryoSPARC gui. In the shell, if you type “ls -l” (= long option to show ownership and permissions), I think you will find that you are not the owner of the folders; cryoSPARC is. That’s why you can’t delete them. You don’t have permission. Solutions below are ranked from best to worst option (IMO).

  1. Delete the projects from within the cryoSPARC gui.
  2. If you can’t do #1 and have to work from the workstation shell, you can try logging in as cryosparc, if you know the username/password that cryosparc is using.
  3. In pinch, you can probably use sudo to delete the folders, if you have superuser access. Be very careful with this, because sudo gives you the power to really screw things up. If you don’t know what sudo means, you probably shouldn’t try to use it.

I ran into a similar issue. In my case I was running cryoSPARC on a university cluster, so #2 and #3 were not options for me and I was left with these folders taking up space on my account that I had no way to delete. Deleting the project from within the cryoSPARC gui worked.

Best,
RJ

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