The default permission for /dev/console (which is linked to /devices/pseudo/cn@0:console) is 620 (crw--w---). What I'm trying to do is to login to CDE as user1 and start a shell script such as dbstart for ORACLE as user2. When doing so, I want to output the messages on the console window so I have redirected the output of the shell script to /dev/console. ( # $ORACLE_HOME/bin/dbstart > /dev/console 2&>1 & ) But because the permission for /dev/console is denied for user2, the action won't be permitted. To solve this, I have changed the permission of /devices/pseudo/cn@0:console to 666 (crw-rw-rw). This has solved the problem. But since I have changed the default setting which I presume won't be changed unlikely, would there be any major problem I should worry about by doing this ? Or maybe I shouldn't have done this in the first place ? Any advice will be appreciated. Thanks, FB