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Re: All settings are lost at logout



On Monday 21 November 2016 11:58:39 Greg Wooledge wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 11:53:35AM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > Call up a terminal, and type:
> >
> > cd
> > sudo chown -R yourusername:yourusername *
>
> This will miss the dot files, and the home directory itself.
>
> sudo chown -R "$LOGNAME:$LOGNAME" .
>
True, my bad.  OTOH, if he has somehow lost ownership of /home/him, he 
has a much larger problem, and he will need to become root and cd 
to /home, then use your command line verbatum, but I would first

echo $LOGNAME

To find out who the system really things he is.

> And of course, you are doing this interactively, NOT in a script,
> which means you should notice if the cd fails.  If the cd fails, DO
> NOT run the chown command.

Yep, he has much bigger problems in that event.

> It would also be a good idea to *check* the ownerships of everything
> before doing the chown, just to make sure you're solving the correct
> problem.

In my case thats around 35 Gb of stuff to sift thru as my email corpus 
goes back to around 2002 in some maildirs. Since I should absolutely own 
everything in my ~/usr directory, its just easier to let the system do 
it since it can't hurt anything.  I don't know of, or am not familiar 
with, any tool in our bag of tricks that could easily find the missed 
ownership(s).

Obviously the thought of doing that at the filesystems root = / would 
inflict damages similar to an rm -Rf. Common sense will be needed.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>


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