Atom does not start after running once as root due permission of /tmp/atom-nohup.out

[bentolor]

Problem

Atom does no longer start after it has been run by root or probably any other user with a restrictive umask. This is because the atom.sh script pipes out the output to the same shared file /tmp/atom-nohup.out

Steps to reproduce

Run

 $ sudo su - root -c atom
 $ atom
 /usr/bin/atom: Zeile 84: /tmp/atom-nohup.out: Keine Berechtigung

The second call fails because nohup cannot write/access the file. This might work if root has a very permissive umask.

Solution

Probably atom should create and use tmp-Dirs per user, which is common style in Debian or at least allow global writing on the lofgile (hacky version).

[kevinsawicki]

What do you think about storing it in ~/.atom/atom-nohup.out?

A similar issue happened when the compile cache was storing in the temp folder, that was moved to ~/.atom/compile-cache.

[bentolor]

Sure! This is easy and would solve the problem.

Maybe it should start off a new file vs. appendng it to avoid endless growing of the log file. Or implement a minimal rotation of the previous ~/.atom/atom-nohup.out into ~/.atom/atom-nohup.out.1.

[bentolor]

@kevinsawicki Thank you for the quick fix!

Just a moment ago I stumbled upon a similar issue, which is very related but much trickier, I guess. As a background: I do like atom so much, that I started it to use it as a drop-in replacement for gedit. Even to edit system configuration files. In this scenario it's quite common to invoke editors via sudo.

Atom will start in a broken state if you i.e. once launched sth. like a very common plain sudo atom /etc/hosts, because in this case $HOME still points the original user directory, though the process is started under root privileges. This seems to be a distribution specific default behavior of sudo. As result any file created in this Atom session will become unwriteable for the original user:

[30615:0724/202223:INFO:CONSOLE(29)] "Error: EACCES, permission denied '/home/ben/.atom/compile-cache/less/62b7a669af25a948e0632eac5cb2bf860f9c0e6e/imports.json'

To be honest: You are able run into similar issues on other programs too, but most of them tend not to create new files unless triggered. I'm not sure if there is an easy fix.

[kevinsawicki]

@bentolor Mind creating a new issue for this?

[antuane]

Its easy!

"sudo chmod 777 ~/.atom/atom-nohup.out"

[ksthiele]

Still not fixed for me

[ftcosta]

Same here. Just reinstalling atom over itself did the trick.

wget -c https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/download/v1.11.2/atom-amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i atom-amd64.deb
sudo rm atom-amd64.deb

[corysimmons]

This is broke for me. Ran sudo atom ~/.zshrc now I can't use Atom like: atom .

sudo rm /home/foo/.atom/nohup.out fixes it for me.

[CasperHK]

I fixed it by:

sudo apt-get remove atom
sudo apt-get install atom

[xiuliren]

these tricks do not work for me.

My atom can not be launched, get this error

/usr/bin/atom: line 130: 13875 Floating point exception(core dumped) nohup "$ATOM_PATH" --executed-from="$(pwd)" --pid=$$ "$@" > "$ATOM_HOME/nohup.out" 2>&1

I can launch it using sudo, but lost a lot of features since the home is pointed to /root.

[DrWongKC]

sudo chmod 777 ~/.atom/atom-nohup.out <-- worked for me. I also deleted compile script.

[deejayingo]

Thanks, that worked!! I did the following (starting on a blank ubuntu 17.04 without atom:

First installed atom:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/atom
sudo apt update; sudo apt install atom

(Thanks to http://tipsonubuntu.com/2016/08/05/install-atom-text-editor-ubuntu-16-04/

Second I did the ftcosta stuff: (thanks man(or woman)):
wget -c https://github.com/atom/atom/releases/download/v1.11.2/atom-amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i atom-amd64.deb
sudo rm atom-amd64.deb

Now I can open atom like this like gedit:
sudo atom ~/Downloads/test.txt

Hope I could help

[tagpro]

This worked for me

cd ~/.atom
chown -R -v <username> nohup.out 

[lock]

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