This suggestion is a little out there, but it's worth a go. SuSE linux has a feature that periodically checks and, if necessary, resets the permissions on various system files. This is done according to the specifications in /etc/permissions, which looks like this (excerpted): # # /etc # /etc/lilo.conf root:root 600 /etc/passwd root:root 644 /etc/shadow root:shadow 640 /etc/init.d root:root 755 (That may look funky in some email clients; there are supposed to be three columns.) Each row specifies the name of a file, the owner and group, and the permissions. If you could get a SuSE permissions file (email me off-list if you want one), you could write a quick script that could reset the permissions of everything in the file. My guess is that the biggest differences you'd run into would be in which system accounts did and didn't exist -- for instance, redhat doesn't have a 'shadow' group, but SuSE does. Still, with minimal effort you could have a system that would at least be functional. Or you could hose it even worse, who knows? :) Chris St. Pierre Unix Systems Administrator Nebraska Wesleyan University On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Ed Wilts wrote: >On Fri, Jul 01, 2005 at 04:40:05PM +0200, Martin Thoma wrote: >> I just made a big mistake. I wanted to change to ownership of a >> directory and its subdirectories. I was to fast and typed a wrong >> regular expression so, that I changed the ownership of the files in the >> hole dir tree. Is there a way, to made that changes undo? I hope so, If >> not, what is the best to do now? > >Comment 1: You can't undo. The change has been made permanent and now >you're up to try and fix what you've done. > >How to proceed depends on what you corrupted. If it's /home, your >fastest method would be to write a script that looks up the username in >the passwd file and sets the ownership down from there. > >If you can't guess who the original owners should have been and you >really corrupted everything from / down, you're unfortunately better off >restoring from your backups. Make another backup first, restore the >system, and then do an incremental comparison to see what needs to be >restored, remembering of course that you don't want to restore the >corrupted ownerships. It's going to be ugly. > >If you have no backups, you're going to have a really bad weekend. > >-- >Ed Wilts, RHCE >Mounds View, MN, USA >mailto:ewilts@xxxxxxxxxx >Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program > >-- >redhat-list mailing list >unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe >https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list > -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
