Re: HELP! can't become root
On Thursday 11 October 2007 13:04, Jonathan Wilson wrote:
> On Wednesday 10 October 2007 13:04, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> > I seem to recall once I did a chown -R something and it followed the
> > /. and /.. links in the directory so that it started walking up the
> > directory tree. luckily I stopped it. Perhaps chmod -R is doing a
> > similar thing?
> >
> > A
>
> That does /not/ happen with any utility's -R. They don't walk up the tree
> with ../ , it would be way too dangerous to have any utility work that way.
> Think about it. Below are some exampoles using * and even .* to prove it
> (it's a little hard to read with line wrapping):
Actually, I was wrong! (partially) and it's somewhat frightening. It does
indeed climb up one level - just one, I don't know why.
(please note that in my examples I'm using a combination of ls -l and ls -ld )
Running chown -R .* does in fact, change the ownership of just one level up:
amethyst:/tmp/test/1/2/3/4# chown -R fred .*
amethyst:/tmp/test/1/2/3/4# ls -ld /tmp/test/1/2/
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 72 2007-10-11 12:56 /tmp/test/1/2/
amethyst:/tmp/test/1/2/3/4# ls -ld /tmp/test/1/2/3/
drwxr-xr-x 3 fred root 72 2007-10-11 12:56 /tmp/test/1/2/3/
amethyst:/tmp/test/1/2/3/4# ls -ld /tmp/test/1/2/3/4/
drwxr-xr-x 3 fred root 72 2007-10-11 13:07 /tmp/test/1/2/3/4/
Or viewed another way:
amethyst:/tmp/test/1/2/3/4# ls -ld .
drwxr-xr-x 3 jw root 72 2007-10-11 13:07 .
amethyst:/tmp/test/1/2/3/4# ls -ld ../
drwxr-xr-x 4 jw root 96 2007-10-11 13:10 ../
amethyst:/tmp/test/1/2/3/4# ls -ld ../../
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 72 2007-10-11 12:56 ../../
AND, what's really uncomfortable is that it changes the ownership on any other
directories that are inside the next folder up:
amethyst:/tmp/test/1/2/3/4# chown -R jw .*
amethyst:/tmp/test/1/2/3/4# ls -l /tmp/test/1/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 72 2007-10-11 12:56 2
amethyst:/tmp/test/1/2/3/4# ls -l /tmp/test/1/2/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 4 jw root 96 2007-10-11 13:10 3
amethyst:/tmp/test/1/2/3/4# ls -l /tmp/test/1/2/3/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 3 jw root 72 2007-10-11 13:07 4
drwxr-xr-x 3 jw root 72 2007-10-11 13:10 sub1
amethyst:/tmp/test/1/2/3/4# ls -l /tmp/test/1/2/3/sub1/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 3 jw root 72 2007-10-11 13:10 sub2
amethyst:/tmp/test/1/2/3/4# ls -l /tmp/test/1/2/3/sub1/sub2/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 jw root 48 2007-10-11 13:10 sub3
However, this would mean the OP had to do something like:
cd /dev
ch[mod] -R .*
because chown -R * does not climb the tree like .* does.
JW
--
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System Administrator - Cedar Creek Software http://www.cedarcreeksoftware.com
http://jwadmin.blogspot.com/
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