Guys, I am sure this question has been answered a million times, but I cannot for the life of me find a simple answer (I am sure I am to blame )

I got tired of Windows and isntalled Ubuntu. I love it.

I have one problem.

I have only one user, it is called "a" (literally).

I have a home/a/music forder with all my music.

For some reason, root is the only one who has access to some of the files and folders.

Me being a windows guy, I googled around and found the command "gksudo "gnome-open /". I run it and it gives me an error, but it runs a file manager all the same, with root credentials. I know, I know, this is the best way to freak linux guys out. I only have music in this PC, no sercurity risk. Shall Anonymous decide to hack it, I'll just reinstall ubuntu

So, I have the file manager running with root credentials, I select my "music" forlder, select "a" in permisions and choose "a" in all pull downs and create and delete files whenever possible. Apply to all sub folders and files (or something like that). Then I go into the folders and the folders and files's permisions have not been changed.

So I went into some folders and changed it, but the files inside did not change.

Now I have a nightmare of "root", "a", group "a", group "root" (and all that) all over my music and I cannot copy, move or listen to my tunes.

Is there a way to tell linux that "a" AND "root" are to be allowed to do what ever they please with every single file and folder in my musci folder?

If so, please, please, please, put something I can copy and paste in a terminal window, as I am not linux sabby, and things like "run pkNuke on the /rtr main sub-console" means nothing to me but that I have a lot of catching up to do

Cheers,

Alessio

The two commands you want are chown and chmod.

Open a terminal in root.

In your case I guess you could run the following command.

First you need to take ownership of the files.

That takes ownership of /home/a folders, subfolders, and files and makes user a (with group a) ownership of the path.

Then you could modify the permissions of your folders.

That will give read/write/execute to the owner of all the folders under the path /home/a, read/execute to all groups members (users part of group a), and give no permissions to everyone else.

You could leave the file permissions alone for now and see if modifying the permissions to just the folders resolves your problem.

That's how I would recommend recovering from this dilemma as a start.

SAM

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Glad I could help. Here is a great tutorial which teaches you how the chmod command works interactively. I used it the first time I learned chmod.

http://catcode.com/teachmod/

You could also look up Linux ACL (or Access Control List) as this is basically what we changed to fix your problem. If you have a security concern with ACLs then I have previously answered a question on this so it's not a bad read.

Don't forget the man pages for a command (which is like running COMMAND /? in Windows). Type "man man" without quotes in the terminal and you'll see what I mean.

Press q to quit the man page entry.