file ownerships changed

Ed Wilts ewilts at ewilts.org
Fri Jul 1 16:56:02 UTC 2005


On Fri, Jul 01, 2005 at 04:40:05PM +0200, Martin Thoma wrote:
> I just made a big mistake. I wanted to change to ownership of a 
> directory and its subdirectories. I was to fast and typed a wrong 
> regular expression so, that I changed the ownership of the files in the 
> hole dir tree. Is there a way, to made that changes undo? I hope so, If 
> not, what is the best to do now?

Comment 1:  You can't undo.  The change has been made permanent and now
you're up to try and fix what you've done.

How to proceed depends on what you corrupted.  If it's /home, your
fastest method would be to write a script that looks up the username in
the passwd file and sets the ownership down from there.  

If you can't guess who the original owners should have been and you
really corrupted everything from / down, you're unfortunately better off
restoring from your backups.  Make another backup first, restore the
system, and then do an incremental comparison to see what needs to be
restored, remembering of course that you don't want to restore the
corrupted ownerships.  It's going to be ugly.

If you have no backups, you're going to have a really bad weekend.

-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program




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