SSH Bad Owner Or Permissions Error

21st January 2013 - 2 minutes read time

After a recent update on Ubuntu I found that I was unable to use ssh due to a strange permissions error to do with the ssh config file. This was quite a problem as I wasn't able to push changes to my git server. The error was as follows:

$ ssh hostname
Bad owner or permissions on ~/.ssh/config

All that was needed was for my user only to have read and write permissions to the ssh config file. The following command fixed things for me.

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config

If that doesn't solve things for you then you might need to also make sure that the correct user is associated with the config file.

chown user:user ~/.ssh/config
linux

Add new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Related Content

Clockwork Pi uConsole CM4: A Review

30th March 2025

I was doing some research into the Raspberry Pi a while ago and I happened to come across a neat little enclosure for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) called the uConsole.

Read more

Using The Fingerprint Scanner On Pop! OS 22.04

30th April 2023

I work on a couple of ThinkPad laptops (T490 and a P14s) and whilst they have fingerprint scanners I haven't really considered using them. I once attempted to get a fingerprint scanner working in Linux on an old HP laptop and that experience put me off trying again.

Read more

Timing Page Responses With Curl

27th March 2022

Timing web requests is possible in curl using the -w or --write-out flag. This flag takes a number of different options, including several time based options.

Read more

Repointing A Symlink To A Different Location

10th December 2020

In Linux, creating a symlink is a common way of ensuring that the directory structure of a deployment will always be the same. For example you might create a symlink so that the release directory of release123/docroot will instead be just current.

Read more