Re: Ownership Question

[Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca>]

On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 01:25:47AM -0600, Telly Williams wrote:
> 
>Most of my files/folders are owned by root.  It's starting to seem like
>that's not such a great idea because a few of the programs that I use
>don't like you to be root when you run them.
>
>So I'm thinking that I should start recursively changing the ownership
>of my files to the local user, as I'm the only user of this computer
>anyways.  I'm not sure if I said what I said correctly, but is changing
>my ownership drastically like this a good idea?  Isn't it bad to have
>so many files owned by root?  If my system got compromised then they
>could do whatever.
> 

You should only run root when you need to run root, and your umask
should be conservative.  You should probably read harden-doc although
realize that it is a little out of date.  You should _never_ run the
xserver as root.  Run as a normal user and use su (or some such) to
become root only as needed.

Are these files/folders in /root?  If so, the easiest way would be to,
as root, move them into your normal user's home directory then do a
chown -R user.user on the whole directory.

Doug.