need help restoring permissions on my downloads folder

Another_username@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 53 points –

I removed my permissions on my downloads folder using chmod.

can anyone help restore back to default?

Thanks!

39

sudo chmod 755 ~/Downloads

assuming you don't need a recursive solution for subdirectories

-R to recurse. Good for chmod and chown

useful for chown, less so for chmod: I almost never want my dirs and files with the same permissions, and I made this mistake a few times.

find dir -type f -exec chmod 644 -- {} +
find dir -type d -exec chmod 755 -- {} +

If all you need is to restore read permissions, you could use symbolic rather than octal:

chmod -R a+r $DIR

If you don't want to grant read permissions to everyone you can replace the a with whichever applies of ugo for user, group or other.

Go over it with a second chmod -R but with -X to add execute but only to directories

I love everything about this screenshot

The non proportional font on terminal 🤌

I think they should use Comic Sans instead.

Thanks y’all! chmod 755 worked! Back to drwxr-xr-x

Tip: you can also use chmod u+rwx,g+rx,o+rx etc to add permissions

With the initial letters corresponding to "user", "group" and "other", and (r)was, (w)rite, e(x)ecute for the rest.

In the case of directories, x specifies access to files/etc within the directly (read just let's you see them)

You can also use i.e "o-rw" etc etc to remove existing permissions

If you use X instead of x it'll add execution permission to directories without making files executable.

Oh yeah I forgot to mention that. It's important when using wildcards or recursive permissions!

I was weirded out by the 12288 filesize. If anyone else is wondering.

So used to seeing 4096 lol

Huh, I thought it's a file, but I saw it's a dir. What's up with that odd value?

So how i understood from the link it's that in those 4k all file names in that directory are stored. That space can grow if necessary but won't shrink automatically. So i assume that op has alot of files in that directory

I do have a lot of files in that directory…but music has more files and taking more space. Strange…

My reading was it wasn't based purely on number of files, but metadata related to files and stuff (idk what that is in ext4, but movies tend to be large and complex related to music). it's probably irrelevant because that's still a really small number on a modern hard drive.

I believe directories contain pointers to the nodes under them, so they get bigger with lots of things in them.

sudo chmod 777 ~/Downloads

As easy as that!