Dovecot and script execution - permission denied for a system command

Question

I have a shell script which is looking for a mailbox path

result=`find /var/mailboxes -type d -name me@my-domain.com`
perl -pi -e 's/Folder-to-Remove//g' $result/subscriptions

but executing it via Dovecot Sieve I'm getting an error message:

lmtp: Error: find: `/var/mailboxes/63': Permission denied

where /var/mailboxes/63 is not even owned by me@my-domain.com

Shell script has permission to execute by others.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 09 '16 at 15:48

1

The error means that the Unix user that is used to execute the script, does not have permissions to access /var/mailboxes/63 directory / file.

You need to find out some solution so that the directory / file permissions / ownership is set up so that the Dovecot Sieve user can access it. One has to keep security issues in mind.

In order to give a more complete answer, I need to see the ownership and permissions of the file / directory and the Unix user and the user's group used to run the Sieve script.

answered Dec 09 '16 at 15:48

Tero Kilkanen

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But `/var/mailboxes/63` is not right result for that find command anyway. When I execute that script via bash I'm getting correct path. – JackTheKnife Dec 09 '16 at 15:55
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The `find` command searches through all files in `/var/mailboxes`, and the error occurs because it cannot access `/var/mailboxes/63`. – Tero Kilkanen Dec 09 '16 at 15:58
OK, got it. Is there any way to tell `find` to skip that mbox? – JackTheKnife Dec 09 '16 at 16:03
`find` has quite powerful methods for searching, I think there might be an option to exclude directories from search. However, I don't know exactly what the option is. – Tero Kilkanen Dec 09 '16 at 19:19
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Use -type d -name what_I_want_to_exclude -prune – Chris Rees Dec 10 '16 at 08:51

Dovecot and script execution - permission denied for a system command

1 Answers1