[SOLVED] Ran sudo chown root /home

MickTheRus · 11-15-2020, 09:22 AM

I was hella tired yesteday and ran sudo chown root /home Now I can't sign in. Any way to give ownership back to the OS

Edit 1: Fixed it using
> sudo chown mick /home/mick

petelq · 11-15-2020, 09:36 AM

Does elementaryos create a root account? As far as I recall it's based on ubuntu which doesn't. If you can log in to a console as root you should be able to change ownership of your own user folder within /home.

Turbocapitalist · 11-15-2020, 09:41 AM

If there is no root password, you should still be able to log into the console (not the terminal) as a normal user. It'll complain a little and then probably drop you into / or /home/ where you can then use sudo to fix the ownerships.

You can get to the console by pressing ctrl-alt-f2 or ctrl-alt- and one of the other function keys.

As you see the graphical login will not work until the permissions are fixed.

MickTheRus · 11-15-2020, 09:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by petelq

Does elementaryos create a root account? As far as I recall it's based on ubuntu which doesn't. If you can log in to a console as root you should be able to change ownership of your own user folder within /home.

I switched from Elementary OS to Manjaro Long time ago.

michaelk · 11-15-2020, 11:21 AM

Quote:

chown root /home

Since most if not all distributions /home is owned by root anyway just running the command as posted should not of caused any problems. If you ran the command recursively then yes everything within /home will be owned by root.

I was surprised that Manjaro would let you login as root via the GUI if you select not listed from the log in menu. I have manjaro 19.0.2 running as a VM. Log in as root and change the ownership back for your user's home directory. Permissions should remain the same.