Friday, April 9, 2010

Chmod, and rebuilding from scratch

Before I forget, just a brief note about what I learned yesterday. After some odd errors both in Amarok and during an Amarok re-build, both of which involved permissions, I did a $ sudo chmod 777 /home -R command,* blew away my old Amarok build (going back to empty folders) and successfully rebuilt.

Also, all those tracks with previously un-editable tags -- now editable. So, sudo is no longer required to do a make in $HOME. Perhaps using sudo for that in the first place created some of the problems, so in future, I'll check permissions first!

*I've been advised (thanks, Mamarok!) that 777 is a bad idea, since it gives permission to any and all. chown -R username folder/ is better.

4 comments:

  1. Hmm this works but is a poor solution, what you just did is make everything in your home world readable (anybody with access to your system), including things like private keys, mails etc.
    This might not be an issue on your system but the proper change would have been to change the owner, not the access rules.

    call is similar:
    chown -R USER:GROUP path

    This sets you as the owner of everything in your home directory, fixing permissions is mostly about setting correct owners.

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  2. Valorie, this command made everything in all your users' homes readable/writable for everyone on the system. It's complete overkill for solving a permissions problem, and returns security and privacy for your users' data to the levels of a Windows 95 system.

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  3. I strongly recommend *not* chmodding your home dir to 777. That means any user on your system has full access to modify and delete your files. That's totally not safe!

    Something like 755 or 644 would be better, and keep your files safe. Just make sure to leave the directories executable.

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  4. Hmmm, blogspot seems to be swallowing comments -- I approved three. This is the second time this has happened. If you have commented, and it hasn't shown up, please feel free to comment again.

    I have a one-user laptop, and it is passworded, so security isn't a big concern. Can any of you recommend a site or article where I could read more about this? My solution solved my problem, but I certainly don't want to cause damage to my system.

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