I have messed up system directory ownerships

Mike Gibson · 02-17-2005, 12:17 PM

I have done something rather foolish - albeit by accident damn the chown command.

I have managed to change the ownership on all files and directories under / to root:root - i.e. owned by root user and root group.

I have restored ownership of user files, i.e. stuff under /home to their rightful owners/groups and the same for but ...

I believe that some system directories/files (/usr, /dev, ...) whilst perhaps owned by the root user are "owned" by system groups other than root - e.g. bin, disk etc.

This is listing of my / directory:

$ ls -al /
total 233
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 Feb 15 18:56 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 Feb 15 18:56 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 15 18:56 .autofsck
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 26 21:43 bin
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 1024 Feb 15 16:33 boot
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Feb 15 10:26 data1
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Aug 26 21:40 data2
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 118784 Feb 15 18:59 dev
drwxr-xr-x 63 root root 8192 Feb 17 14:09 etc
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 51 Aug 26 22:06 .fonts.cache-1
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Feb 17 13:42 home
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 24 2003 initrd
drwxr-xr-x 11 root root 4096 Aug 26 21:49 lib
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9598 Feb 8 14:49 log
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Aug 26 21:39 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 11 18:16 misc
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Aug 26 22:05 mnt
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Feb 16 18:47 opt
dr-xr-xr-x 86 root root 0 Feb 15 18:55 proc
drwxr-x--- 16 root root 4096 Feb 17 14:09 root
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 8192 Feb 8 14:45 sbin
drwxrwxrwt 17 root root 4096 Feb 17 17:41 tmp
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root 4096 Feb 8 14:45 usr
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 4096 Feb 4 14:53 var
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 8 14:45 view
$

Whilst the system seems to be stable now, I am concerned that on reboot it will fall appart.

Does anyone have a listing of the ownerships of the system dircetories and contents so that I can put the proper (original default) ownerships back in place? or, is the fact that these are owned by root sufficient that this will not be an issue?

Thanks

Matir · 02-17-2005, 12:46 PM

It'll probably be an issue at some point, though I don't think it will cause MASSIVE problems. Certain apps may cease to function (cd writing, etc.) if you use devfs or udev, I believe your /dev permissions will be restored automagically upon reboot.

So long as no chmod errors were involved, you should be ok.

Tinkster · 02-17-2005, 12:53 PM

Hi Mike, and welcome to LQ!

Depending on your distro there may be a reasonably
easy way to restore the perms to their original settings.
Which distro are you using?

Cheers,
Tink

Mike Gibson · 02-17-2005, 01:19 PM

I am running Red Hat Enterprise 3 ES Update 4 if that is what you mean - sorry lots of new terminology for me!

Mike

Tinkster · 02-17-2005, 01:58 PM

That is indeed what I meant :)

Look here

Cheers,
Tink

Mike Gibson · 02-17-2005, 02:45 PM

I think what this script does is reset permissions on the files to the original permissions defined in the rpm package. My problem isn't permissions but ownership. I guess that I could use this script as the basis for doing the same thing but doing a chown rather than chmod?

Mike

Tinkster · 02-17-2005, 04:29 PM

Heh, sorry ... and you're right!

Took me a while to half-way understand spawny's
script ... have a look at the output of this one on
your machine. I don't have an rpm-based installation
so have a bit of difficulty to see what it does. ;)

Code:

#!/bin/bash
# Purpose: Restore filesystem ownerships from RPM database
#            distro's that don't do package management suck major.
#            *Make sure yer RPM database is sane...
# Args: none or package name
# Deps: Bash, GNU utils, rpm
# Run from: manual, emergency only

case "$#" in
0) rpmopt="a"; unset pkg;;
*) unset rpmopt; pkg="$1";;
esac

rpm -q${rpmopt} --dump ${pkg}|while read t; do
        t=( ${t} );
        echo "${t[5]:0:7}:${t[6]:0:7} ${t[0]}";
done

The bits in red are definitely untested (I just installed
ONE test rpm, all files owned by root and it displayed
something that made sense to me ...

Code:

:~/tmp4]$ ./rpm-perms 
root:root /usr/include/bibtex.h
root:root /usr/lib/libbibtex.a
root:root /usr/lib/libbibtex.la
root:root /usr/lib/libbibtex.so

Now running something like:

Code:

/tmp/rpm-perms|while read owners file; do chown ${owners} ${file}; done

should work as it would for the perms ...

Cheers,
Tink

Mike Gibson · 02-18-2005, 03:07 AM

Many thanks I will give it a try.

danieljames · 02-21-2005, 07:12 PM

g'day Mike

I am hoping you can help me. How did you use chown to change ownership to all files at once. I made a mistake to . . . somehow I changed the ownership of everything in my personal home to another user when I was in root mode. I want to change all ownerships back but it is tedious chaging each one individually, what did you do to chage everything in a directory at once?

btmiller · 02-21-2005, 07:19 PM

Shell wildcards ... chown user * will change every file in the directory, add -R to make it recursive (does subdirectories too). Be carefull -- as this thread indicates, you can do bad things to your system by misusing these.

Tinkster · 02-21-2005, 10:13 PM

And if it's more or less all in your users home...

chown -R user /home/user

Cheers,
Tink

Mike Gibson · 02-22-2005, 12:42 PM

I certainly echo the "be careful". I hit the problem of "unexpected" results because there are a large number of "hidden" files and directories in your yome with names the begin with a dot (.).

Without thinking I did - chown -R * ...... no problem, followed by
chown -R .* ..... sadly this includes ".." ... my problems began!

Tinkster · 02-22-2005, 12:46 PM

Did the modfied script work for you, btw?

Cheers,
Tink

Mike Gibson · 02-23-2005, 11:10 AM

Yes indeed thanks. It is now safely stored away for future use - I hope not!