[SOLVED] Regain file permissions

nine9nine · 07-09-2012, 01:09 PM

Hi, everyone. I recently had to reinstall my Ubuntu 12.04 system, so before I did, I backed up all of my files. For some reason, when I did, all of my files were given to 'root' as the owner. This means, that when I copied them back, I can't access any of them. I am able to open Nautilus as root, and manually edit each folder's and file's permission, but I have a lot of files, so this would be very time consuming. Is there a way that I can edit all of the permissions at once? (Highlighting them all doesn't work, I tried)

sag47 · 07-09-2012, 01:25 PM

see the chown and chmod command. To be run from the terminal.

Code:

chown -R user:group folder/

Where -R is recursive.

Learn more:
man chown
man chmod

nine9nine · 07-09-2012, 05:25 PM

Thanks, that worked! I did have to put "sudo" in front of it, but then it worked.

sag47 · 07-09-2012, 07:57 PM

FYI here's an interactive way to learn chmod. It's how I learned it several years ago.

http://catcode.com/teachmod/