I tried this command in the terminal. How do I find the missing operand to activate the command, please?

the command is: chown -R /home/username/.ICEauthority

"[username]@[username-computer model] ~ $ su
Password:
[username-computer model] [username] # chown -R /home/[username]/.ICEauthority
chown: missing operand after ‘/home/[username]/.ICEauthority’
Try 'chown --help' for more information.
[username-computermodel] [username] # "

chown requires at least the username (owner) as argument.

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chown is for change owner, you have to assign the new owner.

chown -R user directory

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I suggest some Linux Basics study:
### Beginner User Guides: ###
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
Linux for Beginners, Multiple Howtos, Manpages etc...
Ultimate Linux Newbie Guide
Tips for Linux
Linux Survival

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You're also running "chown -R" which is to recursively change permissions in a directory against the single file .ICEauthority.
This begs the question of why you are doing that in the first place? What's the actual issue you're trying to resolve?

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Every time I log in I get the little white box that says .ICEauthority cannot be updated. I click logout then LM logs in regularly.

I think this is a file permissions issue, although some say it is because I encrypted the home directory when I first installed LM and will just have to delete, format the partition, and reinstall LM.

I am researching file permissions to see if I can solve the problem in another way.

In the ubuntu forum thread linked by another poster in this thread, it says I may already have done damage by using -R, but so far everything is fine.

Perhaps you want to do something like the following:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1906789

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Yes I accessed help and have read the options but don't see how they apply yet.

It seems to me I did include username 3 times:
"[username-computer model] [username] # chown -R /home/[username]/.ICEauthority
chown: missing operand after /home/[username]/.ICEauthority"

Are you saying my username (root) should go after the final .ICEauthority?

In other words the file .ICE authority is misbehaving , so I am trying to change its ownership back to myself.

It looks the first step in the thread your reference is to do something like this:

ls -ld ../kevin /home
drwxr-xr-x 35 kevin kevin 12288 2012-01-10 19:36 ../kevin
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 2011-01-14 23:01 /home

ls -l is a report command. How would I phrase the first line?
[my user prompt] ls -l then ?

Also in this thread it says to do this:
"cd /home/kevin
sudo touch .ICEauthority # creates blank file with name .ICEauthority
sudo chown kevin:kevin .ICEauthority # makes "kevin" owner of the file
sudo chmod 600 .ICEauthority # sets permissions to "-rw-------" (read/write access to owner only)"

I can do this after I found out what touch means. I believe I have already deleted .ICEauthority with the rm command. If not I can delete it again then input this code.

The things you should be looking to do first are delete the file then carry out the following:But don't forget to substitute your username for kevin in the above. Those steps are doing the following:
Chance directory to your home directory (you type your username and not kevin).
Make a file called .ICEauthority.
Change the owner of the file to username and group called kevin (for which you substitute your own name).
Change the permissions of the file to read and write for the owner only.
http://www.thinkplexx.com/learn/arti...00-777-100-etc

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to I would type:
==========================================
cd /home/[my username]
sudo touch .ICEauthority
sudo chown [my username]:[my username] .ICEauthority
sudo chmod 600 .ICEauthority
===================================================

why wouldn't I want to do all this as root?

Why wouldn't I give myself, as owner and root, execute (x) permissions also?

In a general manner, being root follows the rule "the less,the better ".

Files are never given the execute (x) rights unless they need it (scripts that you *really want* to run).

BTW be carefull not to type the prompt as a command. If I remember well, on forums the users prompts end with # and the root prompt ends with $

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If this is in your personal (non-root) dir, then you shouldn't need sudo.

@Tonus: other way around: # = root, $ = non-root (assuming usual defaults...)

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Sorry, yes this is quite right. It may be necessary to sudo to remove the existing file but those steps don't need sudo.
My apologies, I hadn't twigged when copying over.

Arf, one chance out of two... :-/ Lost :-(

Should type whoami next time. thanks for correcting !

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