permissions & ownership

[Kyrath. (AKA Rob)]

I recently ran into a problem caused by my bad habit of doing most things as root.  When I tried to run a program that was unpacked, configured, compiled, and installed as root, but then tried to execute it as a regular user, I discovered some permissions & ownership restrictions.

Here are my questions:

1. where should I be unpacking tarballs?  I have been doing it in /usr/local/src, but I'm unable to do so as a regular user.

2. My regular account has me as belonging to the users group.  Should this regular account belong to any other groups, perhaps reducing my need to use the root account as often?


-- Rob