My guess is that you started tomcat previously using some other account (possibly root) and so the permissions were set for that user, not you. Run the following command and post the output:
The first thing you should see is a set of permissions. If you used permission bit map 764 then it probably reads -rwxrw-r--The next thing you will see is the number of hard links to the file: it should be 1The next column is the owner name (or number if tomcat was started with an account that no longer exists)The next column is the group name (or number if tomcat was started with a group that no longer exists)
I wont bother with the other columns for now.
As I mentioned earlier, if you specified 764 as the permission bit map, then you have specified that the owner gets "7" or "rwx" or "read + write + execute"; the group gets "6" or "rw-" or "read and write"; and the world gets "4" or "r--" or "read only"
See how that worked? Each digit in the bit map corresponded to owner-group-world in that order, and the bits themselves are just a binary representation for the read bit, the write bit, and the execute bit. So if all 3 bits are turned on, then the equivalent bitmap will be 7.
Since you specified that the world (anybody who has access to your linux box who is not the owner and not in the group) has read-only permissions, then you must be either the owner or in the group in order to write to that file. I am guessing that you are neither the owner nor in the group, since you got a permission error.
You should have seen what group the file belongs to when you ran the "ls -l" command earlier. You can see what groups you belong to by issuing the "groups" command.
Moving forward, from bad ideas to better ideas:
You could change the file permissions to 666, however this is not a good solution.
If you are convinced that nobody else is ever going to run tomcat on jothi-laptop, then you could consider changing the user and/or group to your own username or to a group that you belong to. This is normally a bad idea, but it might work for you since this does not appear to be a standard installation of tomcat, and since the box appears dedicated to you.
Misha has the right idea with setting up a dedicated user (and group) to run tomcat. If you intend to have tomcat running all the time, then that is what I would do (and what I do do). Then add yourself to the same group that tomcat runs under, so that you can easily view the log files. Most of the time you can deploy / undeploy / restart web applications either through the tomcat web interface, or through
ant, or through Eclipse or ... - basically all the standard ways that Tomcat provides so that Tomcat does not need to be restarted.
In some development scenarios, there can be value in having a totally separate development area that you control. So the bulk of Tomcat (the main jars, binary files etc) stay in the default location (in your case /opt/softwares/apache-tomcat-6.0.26/...), but you set up a local area (e.g. /home/jothi/tomcat ) specifically for a particular development process. That way you only need your own personal deploy and work areas in your local directory (and a config directory if you want to play with configuration such as port numbers). This would mean that you (as in user "jothi" on the Linux box) owns everything outright: no special changing permissions.