Anne Wilson wrote, On 11/09/08 13:51:
> Funnily enough, I met exactly this error message yesterday. All I needed to
> do was to boot into single user mode, then chown -R username:groupname
> /home/username for the remaining users.
Anne and all,
A tangential word of caution...
(this is mainly for those who admin multi-user systems where
you have to consider your user-base as potentially hostile or
compromised, not necessarily personal/home systems)
# whoami
joe
# cd ; pwd
/home/joe
# ln -s /etc/passwd passwd
Guess what happens when you come along as root and do:
chown -R joe:joegroup /home/joe ???
/etc/passwd gets owned by 'joe'. (according to POSIX rules on
symlink dereferencing. (see chown() and lchown())
I have learned to get in the habit of ALWAYS typing '-h' with '-R':
chown -hR user:group {dir}
where '-h' specifies to NOT traverse/dereference symlinks.
Because all unix-like distributions behave differently, you may need to figure out
if your linux/unix operates in this fashion and you otherwise may need to use
some combination of 'find -exec' and variant options to not traverse symlinks to do
'chown' operations safely.
--stephen
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