How do I undo last command executed?
 

I wasn't paying attention (late at night) and executed this command

chown user.user -R *

I ment to do it in a folder, but accidently ran it in / and before I knew it I was getting some permissoin errors.. opps... (it was stupid of me... I know..)

Im wondering can I run a command to back to revert all the permissions? Or undo my last command?

I tried searching first... To no avail..

Im running Redhat 9.0..

Thanks!

well if you ran chown as root, i'd say you're pretty much hosed unless you got images of your linux install on cds/dvds. if you ran it as a regular user, then you don't really need to worry about it as even if the user owns a file, he can't change ownership of the file. my guess is that if you ran the chown command as a user, those are the permission errors you were getting.

How long did you let it run before killing the command with ctrl+c? edit- I assume it was run by root.

To play it safe with recursively argumented commands I try to remember to use the verbose arg. with it so I can see what it it is doing and kill it quick if its wrong (there is a considerable performance hit while program lists its actions to con). But of course I don't and just rerun the command with -v to see what it actually did. ( !! -v ) And I assume the program will follow the same path of destructiveness as when run without verbose. So far I have assumed correctly noted the path it took and been able to repair the affected files, manually using more recursive commands when possible -ugh.

From now on, look into Mondo. It has saved my ass more than once. You can do a 'rm -rf /' as root and have your system back up and running in an hour or so.

Link:
http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/

Thanks for all the information... I let the command run until... well it spit back at me with some errors... It was too late.. I took it as a time to change from Red hat to SuSE, since well Red Hats only doing their enterprise version and well fedora which I don't think is ready for my home yet. ;)

enigmasoldier: I will definately look into that backup tool Thanks for the link!

Until next time everyone...