i did a "chmod -R 664 /home/andrew/pics"
& now they are all screwed up:

[andrew@localhost ~]$ ls -l /home/andrew/pics
total 0
?--------- ? ? ? ? ? 2001-12-30
?--------- ? ? ? ? ? 2002-02-17
etc...
?--------- ? ? ? ? ? IMGP0141.JPG
?--------- ? ? ? ? ? IMGP0192.JPG
?--------- ? ? ? ? ? IMGP0195.JPG
etc...


any clue what happened & is it possible to get them back or did i just throw out 3000 pics?

thanks

try

chown -R andrew:andrew /home/andrew/pics
chmod -R +rw /home/andrew/pics

and see if that changes anything..I only wonder how on earth you could get "?---------", meaning that where the heck did you get that question mark there? sounds more than odd..

EDIT: you could also try (as root) to change the owner of the files to another user, say root, and chmod, and then change it back to "andrew"..just to make sure. but anyway this is the first time in my life I see something like this happens..

3000 pictures--I hope they are backed up....

Can you open one of the files?

If no backup, then DO NOT write anything to that disk until you figure out what is happening. The files are very likely recoverable

What file-system are you using?

I don't think that the chmod command would have done that,
there's got to be something wrong with the media or a major
file-system corruption.


Cheers,
Tink

i did
chown -R andrew:andrew /home/andrew/pics
chmod -R +rw /home/andrew/pics

& then they worked for root. if i did an "ls -l" as root it would show up fine, the files would open with eog/gimp/gthumb/whatever... but they would not work for any other user, and an "ls -l" would show up like above. tried changing to another user & back, changing permissions back & forth, but got nothing... finally i scp'ed the entire folder to my other computer, where i changed permissions to a user on that one, then brought them back with scp as andrew on the problem computer & now they work.

so i'm not really sure what happened, or what there fixed it, but it works now.

& ya, most of them were backed up. last backup was about a month ago, but they work now... really odd.

thanks,
andrew

Directories need to be Executable! It is execute permission that allows you to access stuff inside a directory; without execute permission you cannot do anything. "664" has not execute permission for anyone, and "+rw" won't help.

Was about to start a thread when I spotted this one. Hope you don't mind the intrusion moschi.
I was trying to change permission on a directory so the directory is 755 but the files are 644. The line asuggested on one site was;
chmod -R a+rX /foo
Is something wrong with that syntax? It didn't work. I am the owner of the directory.

Should work (have worked) [unless of course the file-system doesn't
have support for Linux-features (e.g. if you were using FAT)].


Cheers,
Tink

The directory holds a DOS game so I guess thats the answer. Permissions can be changed on the files one by one but not recursively. Seems strange. Does the learning never end?

Thanks for the reply.