serial0 owned by root, changes back to after reboot

Question

trying to follow some tutorials about accessing serial ports, I kept getting a permission denied error for /dev/serial0, and the common solution seemed to be to add the user to the dialout group... except in my case serial0 is owned by root:root

lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root        5 Aug 21 20:16 serial0 -> ttyS0

I tried chown root:dialout /dev/serial0, and not only did I still get Permission Denied, but upon reboot, the ownership changed back to root:root.

almost all documentation and answers I see show this should be root:dialout. so what's going on with my install? and how do I get access to the serial port without root?

I'm running a recent install of Pi OS with Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)

EDIT: turns out I had serial console enabled within raspi-config, once I disabled that, and only had serial port enabled, I no longer receieved the error.

Answer 1

This is NOT an error!

/dev/serial0 is a link; the device to which it links /dev/ttyAMA0 or /dev/ttyS0 is a member of dialout.

NOTE unless you enable serial there will be no /dev/serial0.

See How do I make serial work on the Raspberry Pi3 or later