I'm trying to clean up the administration of some game servers I run on a Ubuntu box, part of which has been finally setting permissions properly so I can run the Steam console tool that controls updates and such.

I had been running it as root using sudo, but I changed the permissions so that I can start it as a regular user rather than root. That bit seems to work fine, but now when SteamCMD actually starts, it errors with the following output

./steam.sh: line 24: /home/angleosaxon/.steampid: Permission denied
Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(steam)/version(1334262703)
SteamUpdater: Error: Couldn't create directory /home/angleosaxon/Steam/package, got error 13
[  0%] Download complete.
[----] Verifying installation...
unlinked 0 orphaned pipes
[----] !!! Fatal Error: Steam failed to load: *SteamStartEngine(0xbfa7cfa0) failed with error 1: Failed to open logfile /home/angleosaxon/Steam/steam.log

Leaving aside the question of why it wants to add this information to my home directory, why is it getting access denied errors? As I understand it, since it's being run by my account, it operates with my permissions, so it should be able to read/write from my home directory, shouldn't it?

This is the command I'm using to run it:

/opt/steamcmd/steam.sh "+login UserAccount \"This is not my actual password.\"" +force_install_dir $ServerDir "+app_update 215360 validate" +quit