Q:

How to I allow direct write access to a directory under /home/username?

For some reason after reinstalling Debian 8 (LVM encrypted) I need to
sudo for any writing command in certain directories of /home/manuel/ directory (not even all of them!).
I tried chmod a=awx [-R] to allow write access to my user (which belongs to the sudoeur group) but nothing changed.
How do I allow any directory under /home/username to be directly readable/writable/executable when my user (username) is signed in?
EDIT:
ls -l /home/manuel/
returns
...

drwxr-xr-x  4 root   root   4096 Jun  6 12:09 subdir # this is the directory I want to give my user full rwx access

...

A:

Try,
chown manuel:manuel /home/manuel/subdir/ 

above command will give your account ownership over the folder subdir, if there's more directories owned by root under subdir (you can check with ls -Rl /home/manuel/subdir/) you could add the recursive option -R to the earlier chown command like this chown -R manuel:manuel /home/manuel/subdir/. That'll make all folders under subdir owned by manuel.

