This scirpt is ran by the systemd service. In Fedora the service has priviledges dropped to the mysql user. Thus "chown 0" will always fail Never parse 'ls' output! http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/087 --- mariadb-10.4.12/scripts/mysql_install_db.sh 2020-01-26 21:43:53.000000000 +0100 +++ mariadb-10.4.12/scripts/mysql_install_db.sh_patched 2020-01-29 11:11:09.448812331 +0100 @@ -482,13 +482,16 @@ if test -n "$user" then if test -z "$srcdir" -a "$in_rpm" -eq 0 then - chown 0 "$pamtooldir/auth_pam_tool_dir/auth_pam_tool" && \ - chmod 04755 "$pamtooldir/auth_pam_tool_dir/auth_pam_tool" - if test $? -ne 0 + if [ `stat "$pamtooldir/auth_pam_tool_dir/auth_pam_tool" -c %u` -ne 0 ] then + chown 0 "$pamtooldir/auth_pam_tool_dir/auth_pam_tool" && \ + chmod 04755 "$pamtooldir/auth_pam_tool_dir/auth_pam_tool" + if test $? -ne 0 + then echo "Couldn't set an owner to '$pamtooldir/auth_pam_tool_dir/auth_pam_tool'." echo "It must be root, the PAM authentication plugin doesn't work otherwise.." echo + fi fi chown $user "$pamtooldir/auth_pam_tool_dir" && \ chmod 0700 "$pamtooldir/auth_pam_tool_dir"