Linux Group Permissions

[axpen]

Alright I'd like to state first off that I'm not a newb :P, just thought I'd get better help here, seeing as how this is a rudimentary Linux feature. My problem is that I cannot seem to get group permissions to work the way they should, or at least the way I think they should. I assume you are supposed to be able to let joe blow have his ownership the file/folder and make a group called foobar and assign that to the file/folder in question and then slap your username to the group and then assign g+rwxa on the file/folder and you should then have full access... right? Well I'm using SuSe and I am taking advantage of the user home directories for Apache so I can have an admin dir with includes and the likes at /srv/www/htdocs that is owned by root and grouped by webdev. I then can also have my own html sub location at ~/public_html that equates to http://localhost/~username/. Now the exact thing i'm facing is, i've created the webdev group, i've sudo chgrp -R webdev /srv/www/htdocs, i've added myself to the group's users, i've tried editing /srv/www/htdocs/index.php with vi and got [readonly], i've tried creating a folder with mkdir and got access denied. My reason for wanting to do this is so that I can have my own seperate workspace in ~username on the server and still have read/write/mkdir access on the includes folder in htdocs (and yes I know I could just use the group access with includes, but I want full access for other reasons too). Now I should be able to do this right? (BTW I have this problem with all Linux distros I mess with (RH 9, Fedora 4/5/6, SuSe, Debian, Ubuntu)

The steps I have taken in sequence
cd to /srv/www
sudo /usr/sbin/groupadd webdev
sudo /usr/sbin/usermod axpen -A webdev (I also confirmed this in YaST as well)
sudo chgrp -R webdev htdocs
sudo chmod g+w htdocs (it already had r and x)
cd htdocs/includes
mkdir js
[Permission Denied]

Any help anyone can give me will be greatly appreciated,
--Alex

[Cabhan]

The chmod command you ran was not recursive. Do you have write permissions on htdocs/includes?

[axpen]

I apologize, I did run the chmod recursively with the -R option, I just forgot to add it. It appears I may be more newbie than I have originally denied. The problem was that a restart or logoff/login was needed to fix the situation. I thank you for your reply,
Alex

[Cabhan]

Oh yeah. Whenever you add yourself to a group, you need to fully logout for it to take effect.

I always forget about that .

Glad it worked out for you!