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a_neutrino

Member

From: Montreal, Canada

Registered: 2010-03-14

Posts: 50

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[SOLVED] sa-learn complains about denied permissions

sa-learn is a tool provided in spamassassin to "train SpamAssassin's Bayesian classifier".
When running sa-learn as a normal user, you may encounter this error message:

config: cannot opendir /var/lib/spamassassin/3.004000: Permission denied
readdir() attempted on invalid dirhandle SA_CF_DIR at /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/Mail/SpamAssassin.pm line 2100.
closedir() attempted on invalid dirhandle SA_CF_DIR at /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/Mail/SpamAssassin.pm line 2102.
config: cannot opendir /var/lib/spamassassin/3.004000: Permission denied
readdir() attempted on invalid dirhandle SA_CF_DIR at /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/Mail/SpamAssassin.pm line 2100.
closedir() attempted on invalid dirhandle SA_CF_DIR at /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/Mail/SpamAssassin.pm line 2102.
config: path "/var/lib/spamassassin/3.004000/languages" is inaccessible: Permission denied

If this happens, you have run sa-update as root with a umask such as 077. This is how to fix the problem:

$ sudo rm /var/lib/spamassassin -rf
$ umask 022
$ sudo sa-update

I am posting this in the hope that it will save someone the time I spent tracking down the problem.