Directory .instant is generated with root privilegies

Question

Everything was working well until this morning - no idea what has changed.

Running any python script that triggers a JIT compilation fails. The script is only successfully executed with root privilegies. The generated directory .instant is owned by root.

Performing instant-clean does not solve.
Doing sudo chown -R user:user ~/.instant also does not solve.
Removing .instant does not solve.

The error I get is:

In instant.recompile: The module did not compile with command 'cmake
-DDEBUG=TRUE .'

The compile.log file says:

CMake Error: The source directory
"/tmp/tmplD8yd52016-4-6-09-26_instant_271d3e2869289f1d469a88ae659c6cc5a136ac89/ffc_form_014377fdbdf306bcfd4be2db591b960142d91901"
does not appear to contain CMakeLists.txt.
Specify --help for usage, or press the help button on the CMake GUI.

Installed FEniCS 1.6.0 in Ubuntu 15.10 using:

sudo apt-get install fenics

Here is what apt-cache fenics outputs:

apt-cache policy fenics 
fenics:
  Installed: 1:1.6.0.1~ppa1~wily1
  Candidate: 1:1.6.0.1~ppa1~wily1
  Version table:
 *** 1:1.6.0.1~ppa1~wily1 0
        500 http://ppa.launchpad.net/fenics-packages/fenics/ubuntu/ wily/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1:1.5.0.1 0
        500 http://ch.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ wily/universe amd64 Packages

allanleal · Answer 1 · Apr 6, 2016

Looks like some application I installed changed the mode of python2.7 so that any file create with Python open method caused it to be owned by root.

Just performed

chmod 755 /usr/bin/python2.7

and it fixed the issue. I'll leave this here in case someone else has similar issues.

Directory .instant is generated with root privilegies

1 Answer