Re: problem with chmod

["Christofer C. Bell" <christofer.c.bell@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 6:55 AM, Bret Busby <bret@busby.net> wrote:

I know that is how the syntax used to be, because I remember a person (on a UNIX system) losing his account, when he accidentally entered
chmod .
, which changed his . file permissions to zero, and not even the sysadmin could save his account, so he had to be issued with a new account.

While this isn't specific to your issue (as I feel other responses in this thread have answered your question adequately), there is nothing a user can do with chmod to his or her home directory that the root account can't recover.  For your friend's account, the following could have been performed to get him started:

# find /home/username -type d -exec chmod 711 {} \;

# find /home/username -type f -exec chmod 640 {} \;

While this may not have set up everything exactly as your friend would have preferred it, it would have made his account accessible to him again.  He could then add appropriate permissions to things he wanted to grant public access to (for example a public_html directory).

--
Chris