Yeah that's the painful part. A backup would be key here
Worst case you boot up a virtual server with the same OS as your own and just go down the tree learning permissions, and it’s a deep dive learning experience.
What does this do? nobody can read any file? would sudo chmod 777 fix it at least to a usable system?
The trick is that you loose access to every file on the system. chmod is also a file. And ls. And sudo. You see where it's going. System will kinda work after this command, but rebooting (which by a coincidence is a common action for "fixing" things) will reveal that system is dead.
Yep. You could run chmod again to fix it (from a different OS / rescue USB), but that would leave all the permissions in a messy state - having everything set to 777 is incredibly insecure, and will also likely break many apps/scripts that expect more restrictive permissions. So the only way to fix this properly would be to reinstall your OS/restore from backups.
How are you gonna run chmod when you don't have permissions to use it anymore?
sudo chmod 000 -R /is very fun way of braking your system and is not widely known 🙂Can you recover from that?
I imagine if you can mount from a busybox possibly
Then figure out the correct perms.
Eh, just hit it with the 777 and pray. Then swear at it some more.
I think you'll need to change passwd and shadow, maybe a few other files, but besides that it'll mostly work.
This is the traditional method.
Yeah that's the painful part. A backup would be key here
Worst case you boot up a virtual server with the same OS as your own and just go down the tree learning permissions, and it’s a deep dive learning experience.
chrootin and then syncing the permissions from something like the equivalent offilesystempackage in Arch for your distro should get you goingWhat does this do? nobody can read any file? would sudo chmod 777 fix it at least to a usable system?
The trick is that you loose access to every file on the system.
chmodis also a file. Andls. Andsudo. You see where it's going. System will kinda work after this command, but rebooting (which by a coincidence is a common action for "fixing" things) will reveal that system is dead.Yep. You could run chmod again to fix it (from a different OS / rescue USB), but that would leave all the permissions in a messy state - having everything set to 777 is incredibly insecure, and will also likely break many apps/scripts that expect more restrictive permissions. So the only way to fix this properly would be to reinstall your OS/restore from backups.
How are you gonna run chmod when you don't have permissions to use it anymore?