Gfilui

I have a folder located in /var/www that I am trying to move to my user's home directory.

I initially ran mv folder/ ~, and received a permissions denied error. I thought I had set the permissions up correctly, but to be sure I ran sudo chown -R folder/ user where user was my current user. I then ran chmod -R u=rwx folder/ to give myself write and read permissions (or whatever mv might require). However, even after trying to run mv again, I still lacked permissions.

What might cause this?

Full log of me repeating the above process:

webserver@testingweb:/var/www$ ls -la
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Mar 18 10:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 Mar 18 10:13 ..
drwx------ 4 webserver webserver 4096 Mar 18 10:44 website
webserver@testingweb:/var/www$ sudo chown -R webserver website/
webserver@testingweb:/var/www$ ls -la
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Mar 18 10:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 Mar 18 10:13 ..
drwx------ 4 webserver webserver 4096 Mar 18 10:44 website
webserver@testingweb:/var/www$ chmod -R 700 website/
webserver@testingweb:/var/www$ ls -la
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Mar 18 10:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 Mar 18 10:13 ..
drwx------ 4 webserver webserver 4096 Mar 18 10:44 website
webserver@testingweb:/var/www$ mv website/ ~
mv: cannot move 'website/' to '/home/webserver/website': Permission denied
webserver@testingweb:/var/www$

Edit: Interestingly enough, when I tried to move subdirectories and files individually it succeeded without any problems:

webserver@testingweb:/var/www$ cd website/
webserver@testingweb:/var/www/website$ ls
git reproot
webserver@testingweb:/var/www/website$ mv git/ ~/website/
webserver@testingweb:/var/www/website$ ls
reproot
webserver@testingweb:/var/www/website$ mv reproot/ ~/website/
webserver@testingweb:/var/www/website$ ls
webserver@testingweb:/var/www/website$ 

You have write permissions over /var/www/website, but you don't have write permission over /var/www.
In order to move /var/www/website to anywhere you need write permission over /var/www.