Permission problems with cvs

[markpatterson]

Hi,
I wanted to try cvs to get the code for Fire. I did what the website said and got this:

[Helena-Pattersons-iBook:~] markpatt% cvs -dserver:anonymous@cvs.fire.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fire login
(Logging in to anonymous@cvs.fire.sourceforge.net)
CVS password:
cvs login: cannot open /Users/markpatt/.cvspass: Permission denied
cvs [login aborted]: could not open /Users/markpatt/.cvspass: Permission denied

So I cd'ed back to User and got this:
[Helena-Pattersons-iBook:/Users] markpatt% ls -l
total 0
drwxrwxrwt 9 root wheel 306 May 26 21:21 Shared
drwxr-xr-x 18 daniel staff 612 May 27 20:38 daniel
drwxr-xr-x 19 helena staff 646 Apr 21 08:19 helena
drwxr-xr-x 33 markpatt staff 1122 Jun 4 22:27 markpatt

I got this info:
[Helena-Pattersons-iBook:~] markpatt% ls -lA .cvspass
-rw------- 1 root staff 55 Feb 12 11:49 .cvspass

So, it's not mine, it belong to the root. So, I'll just chown it:
[Helena-Pattersons-iBook:~] markpatt% su chown markpatt .cvspass
Password:
su: Sorry

So, I don't know what's going on. Does cvs run as root? I admit I'm a bit of a newbie, but I would have thought that was possible. Can anyone help?

=== Mark

 

[rhg]

The .cvspass file in your home dir should in fact be owned by you, not by root. Maybe you previously ran cvs with root permissions by accident?

However, your chown approach was almost correct, only that you should sudo instead of su, where sudo will ask you for the admin password (which is you as I guess) while su wants the root password (which is usually not set up on Mac OS X).