The importance of current directory

The commands "rm" and "touch" (there might be others) sometimes need that the current directory is writeable for the current user. I have not seen this to be always true, but in case you are getting a "permission denied" error while executing these commands, and if everything else that's obvious (like write permissions on the target directory / file) looks ok, just try running the command after changing the current directory to one that is writeable for you. /tmp is a simple choice.


For rm failure, the error is more explicit to smell this cause: it says "rm: cannot get current directory, permission denied". For touch failure, I just got "permission denied", and it worked after changing current dir to a writeable one.