What Do You Do When You Get “Permission Denied” in FTP?

Problem scenario
You are trying to transfer a file named foobar.txt via FTP.  But you get this error:

local: foobar.txt remote: foobar.txt
local: foobar.txt: Permission denied

What do you do with this "Permission denied" error?

Solution
The above error would not happen if the problem was on the remote server.  (You would get "550 Failed to open file" if the problem was a lack of read permissions on the source of the FTP file transfer.)

Make sure that the destination of the FTP file transfer (that is the local directory) is one where your user has access to write to.  You must have write permissions in the local directory.  If the server was recently set up or changed, the permissions in the local directory may prevent the user from writing to it.  You may want to change to the /tmp directory to initiate the FTP session from there.