On Thu, Nov 02, 2006 at 11:57:00AM +0000, anthony wrote: > Thanks Jochen, > > I think your mail made several reasonable points and contrary to what > you say, I find it perfectly coherent. > > Its a tricky position to be in flailing around in a panic trying to > fix a system you need to be able to work and seeing the time, or > possibility of things being put back together receding from your > expectations. > > You are right that I did not identify the problem very well initially, > but part of this was down to receiving an error that shut me out of > the normal environment from which I would diagnose things. Since the > error message referred to a .dmrc file I assumed this was the problem > until I could get further in . > > I did read the Debian documentation on file permissions, before I made > requests to the list, whilst I can't say that I fully understood the > system of permissions I read enough to get the basic idea and also to > understand that my problem was not addressed there. I think, and this > can probably not be considered a flaw, the debian manual does not > address the issue of how to reset the permissions of a /home after it > has been recursively modified. As I'm sure anybody will tell me, > reading the manual is the antidote to making such a stupid mistake, > nonetheless stupid mistakes we do make. Hi Anthony, changing permissions of files like you did with a recursive command is an accident that anyone can make. There are some general rules to reset directories as per the FHS or LSB and there are permissions set on files in .deb packages for files that are unpacked as well as 'statoverride' file to setup special files. But there is not an easy way to know what permission a files should have beyond having a backup of either the entire files itself or of just the permissions of the files. You can change the permission of any random file but apply a general rule to reset permissions will not take that into account. I had an accident where I deleted /bin by mistake. There is not a rule book on how to get the files back or on how to make them the correct version wrt your os or how to make the os reinstall the correct version. This is the same thing with file permissions. You simply repair the damage as best as you can and fix error as they come up, if you dont have a backup that would reasonably fix the problem, assuming you are not on a deadline. I guess the rule is think twice, type once :-) not that it always helps. Cheers, Kev -- | .''`. == Debian GNU/Linux == | my web site: | | : :' : The Universal | debian.home.pipeline.com | | `. `' Operating System | go to counter.li.org and | | `- http://www.debian.org/ | be counted! #238656 | | my keysever: pgp.mit.edu | my NPO: cfsg.org |
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