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  • How to Fix Write Permissions For DaVinci Resolve

    Here’s how to fix write permissions for DaVinci Resolve.

    Oh snap

    To fix this, just open a terminal and run:

    chmod -R 766 /your/problem/drive/or/directory

    What’s Going On?

    On linux, security is brilliantly built in. By default, files and folders that you create have a set level of permissions (defined by the umask command). Typically, the default is the user (you) have permission to read and write files that you own, as well as search directories you own. All others have read-only access to your files and directories.

    Knowing this, other applications (aka Resolve) do not have permission by default to write to hard drives, folders, or files that you (the user) own. So how do we change this?

    chmod

    To change permissions of a single file or a whole directory, use the chmod command. chmod gives you the ability to change permissions using short, 3-digit number formats. These are known as octal numbers.

    Octal NumberPermissionsFile Listing
    7read, write, and executerwx
    6read and writerw-
    5read and executer-x
    4read onlyr–
    3write and execute-wx
    2write only-w-
    1execute only–x
    0none—

    So in the chmod command, you use the above table to define permissions for the file user/owner, members of the file group, and other people, in that order. The -R flag used in the code above, simply makes the command recursive, applying to every single file and folder inside the directory you apply the command to.

    Examples

    Readable by owner only: chmod 400 examplefile.txt

    Allow the owner and group to read, write, and execute, and anyone else to read and write: chmod 776 examplefile.txt

    Also, there’s an awesome tool for those of you, like me, who can’t keep all those chmod codes straight!

    After this post made it to Twitter, @rohit_bmd made a great point- check Davinci Resolve > Preferences and under the Media Storage tab, you’ll see a list of drives on your system. Make sure you have read/write privileges on the drive at the very top of that list, because that’s where Resolve will be storing all your cache files. Here’s the the tab:

    If you’re new to Resolve on Linux, feel free to check out my other posts.

    matt

    October 4, 2019
    DaVinci Resolve, General Computing, Linux, Ubuntu
    blackmagic design, command line, davinci resolve, file permissions, linux, terminal, video editing
  • Locate Files using Terminal

    Let’s locate files using the terminal! This is just a cool little trick you can use if you’re doing a bunch of stuff in the terminal, and you don’t want to leave, or you’re just interested in cool terminal tricks. Let’s say you’re looking for a file, anywhere on your machine, but you don’t know exactly where it is. You can install a very cool search package called mlocate (or merging locate).

    Install

    On Ubuntu/Debian you can run:

    sudo apt-get install mlocate

    Or if you’re on that Manjaro/Arch life:

    sudo pacman -S mlocate

    Syntax

    To locate files in the terminal by using mlocate, just type:

    locate [name of the file] [directory in which you want to start recursively searching]

    If you’re using mlocate for the first time, it’s not gonna work just yet. mlocate is actually a pair of tool bundled into one. The other half of mlocate is called updatedb. So by running updatedb, you’re essentially creating/updating an index so that you can run your search. So any time you want to run a locate command and it’s not giving you the results you are expecting, there’s a good chance your index is outdated, so you can just run updatedb, then run your locate search again, and you should be good to go.

    Update your junk by running updatedb then run locate [file] to get your mind blown!

    Bonus Tip

    If the results of your locate command are crazy long, like… CRAZY long…. too long to view everything in the terminal because your terminal only has a finite history, here’s a tip: You can print the results of ANY command to a text file and save it anywhere by using >. For example:

    sudo locate myfile.txt / > ~/Desktop/searchresults.txt

    The above command will run a system-wide search for anything matching myfile.txt recursively from the root directory / and print the results to searchresults.txt on the Desktop.

    Good luck and have fun! Now that you’ve found the file you’re looking for, perhaps you want to do something cool with it! If you wanna learn more cool stuff you can do in the terminal, check this out.

    matt

    September 23, 2019
    General Computing, Linux, Ubuntu
    arch, command line, debian, linux, manjaro, search, terminal, ubuntu

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 Thess 5:21