Your shell runs as root, root can always access everything. When you start mysql by hand you're also running it as root (bad idea by the way). The rc(8) script starts mysql via mysqld_safe(1) (which is a shell script), that drops privileges down to the mysql user to start the actual mysqld(8) process.
The files inside those directory should also be owned by root:wheel and most will have 444 (
What are the permission on /lib and /usr/lib?I still don't know how this happened but I got things to be working but I think there still some permission issues lingering somewhere and I am not sure if this is what's causing this issue that I am having.
Code:
root@molly:~ # ls -ld /lib /usr/lib
drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 67 Jan 30 15:13 /lib
drwxr-xr-x 10 root wheel 741 Jan 30 15:17 /usr/lib
-r--r--r--
) permissions (the symlinks may have lrwxr-xr-x
). They should, at the very least, be world readable.