permissions messed up chown command used

tsayles21 · 03-30-2004, 07:18 AM

My level of experience is Newbie that thinks he knows everything but really now nothing about linux.

I did something really bad I logged in as SU and typed

chown -R root:root 777 /
or something like it
at the root directory

now I get errors about permissions all the time

is there some way to put the original permissions back?

or

at least the permission back to when I install Linux?

SO far this site has helped me a lot.

Thanks for the help in the future.

spec6635 · 03-30-2004, 12:32 PM

the root directory should only be accesible to root do "chmod 700 /root/"
then "chown root:root /root/"

HappyTux · 03-30-2004, 03:13 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by tsayles21
My level of experience is Newbie that thinks he knows everything but really now nothing about linux.

I did something really bad I logged in as SU and typed

chown -R root:root 777 /
or something like it
at the root directory

now I get errors about permissions all the time

is there some way to put the original permissions back?

or

at least the permission back to when I install Linux?

SO far this site has helped me a lot.

Thanks for the help in the future.

Reinstall there is no way to track down the permissions on that many files and getting them right again. You may want to backup the /etc directory for future reference but not replacement of the new files and use dpkg --get-selections > selections.txt and save the file then when reinstalled with a base system use after getting apt/dpkg working dpkg --set-selections < selections.txt and dselect update then apt-get dselect-upgrade to get back the packages had installed before the incident.

KneeLess · 03-30-2004, 08:38 PM

It looks like you made every file on the computer (because of -R, recurvsiveness) to be owned by root, and for rwxrwxrwx permissions on every single file.

Who told you to do that?