Unhappy sudo chown -R myuser /

hi
have mistaken performed a
sudo chown -R myuser /
on my macbook...
now it claims it cannot load several kexts like:
/system/library/extensions/system.kext/plugins/mach.kext
/system/library/extensions/system.kext/plugins/libkern.kext
/system/library/extensions/system.kext/plugins/unsuported.kext
/system/library/extensions/system.kext/plugins/bsdkernel.kext
/system/library/extensions/system.kext/plugins/iokit.kext
/system/library/extensions/autofs.kext
I need to repair the default permissions....but disk utility already said i cannot repair the disk due to this error:
the underlying task reported failure on exit
already tried to repair using the install dvd too.
found on the web this procedure:
Boot off the OS X CD (reboot, hold C while booting).
The installer will load up, go to Utilities in the menu and run Terminal.
Type df and look for the drive that has your Mac system mounted---you'll have to unmount this. On my MacBook Pro, it was /dev/disk0s2.
Type umount /dev/disk0s2, replacing disk0s2 with whatever disk your OS lives on.
Type fsck_hfs -r /dev/disk0s2. If you umounted the wrong thing, it will complain that you can't repair a mounted drive. Go back and umount the right thing and repeat this step.
(they forgot to add the step to re-mount...but its ok..)
and this one:
Single user mode (boot with -s) and then type
fsck_hfs -r /dev/volumename
will any of those save me from a archive and install?
HELP!! Those warnings cannot be good... but the system is booting and working fine till now.
thanks

biovizier wrote:
Oh come on, it isn't exactly rocket science. Compare actual permissions to expected permissions and correct discrepancies, while making allowances for a few special cases. The 'chmod -R' command does {sic} move or alter any files, it just changes the permissions so I think it falls well within the realm of what "repair permissions" should be able to handle (but I'd bet it would be faster just to reinstall).
Rocket science is not required to understand that with the "-R" option applied to the root level of the startup drive this isn't something that the permissions repair utility (in any version, old or new) is capable of repairing. That option is the command line equivalent of the Finder's "Apply to enclosed items" option, so the command affects every file in the entire filesystem hierarchy!
At best, the utility can reset permissions only of files with entries in the receipts database -- it is the only place expected permissions are stored -- & if a user acting with superuser privileges clobbers access to that, the OS is going to make those changes, even if it means making the receipts folder unavailable to the routines that must access it. The idea that the OS should 'make allowances' for that special case is ridiculous -- it is tantamount to the idea that there should be a 'super-duper-user' built into the system that prevents users willfully acting with superuser privileges from doing anything foolish.
Apple doesn't need an excuse to leave things as they are. They are that way because the permissions repair utility is not, never has been, & never will be the panacea for every permissions issue that a few users seem to think it should be. As far as I can tell, the only basis for that idea is a superficial examination of the name of the utility, some wishful thinking, & more than a little disregard for what is impractical, if not downright impossible, to implement in a general purpose, UNIX-based OS.
Anytime any user invokes sudo, they should remember the time-tested warning that *with great power comes great responsibility*. In one form or another, that warning has been around for at least 2000 years. It is no less true today. There is no need for anyone to apologize for the fact that not even Apple has found a way around it!

Similar Messages

Wrong ownership on TM-- is it safe to 'sudo chown -R user Time-Machine ?

I ran Migration Assistant by a new user "Admin" to recover the accounts of 3 users on Lion.
After the migration, Admin owns the Time Machine history of one of the users (even though account Admin didn't even exist at the time these backups were made).
Is it safe to run:
sudo chown -R alex "/Volumes/Time-Machine/Backups.backupdb/Alex's MacBook/*/Macintosh HD/Users/alex"

I ran Migration Assistant by a new user "Admin" to recover the accounts of 3 users on Lion.
After the migration, Admin owns the Time Machine history of one of the users (even though account Admin didn't even exist at the time these backups were made).
Is it safe to run:
sudo chown -R alex "/Volumes/Time-Machine/Backups.backupdb/Alex's MacBook/*/Macintosh HD/Users/alex"

Sudo chown + chmod on system drive?

Hello,
Before I mess my system drive up I wanted to check if this is ok.
For various reasons I have created a new Account that I wish to migrate to. I log in ok and can change permissions but there seem to be files on various places that I keep having to set permissions for and wish to resolve this for the whole drive.
What I want is a way to set permissions on all non system files to add admin access as it appears it is not there for certain files
I found the below commands which worked on my media drive but am reluctant to run it on the system drive:
sudo chflags 0 /Volumes/System
sudo chown 0:80 /Volumes/System
sudo chmod 775 /Volumes/System
sudo chmod -N /Volumes/System
I think the one above should have the "R" in as below to do this recursivly ?
sudo chmod -RN /Volumes/System
I don't want to mess up the system drive so I thought I should check if this is ok or not. I think some system files need to be read only so I need to know if this will render the drive useless(I do have a full backup).
I also see people recomend Batchmod but am again unsure if this will work or what settings to use?

Thanks Niel,
I have read numorous posts from yourself and V.K. relating to locked secondary drives but nothing relating to system drives and fully expected that answer. can I bother you a bit more please?
Can I safly run those commands on some of these folders?
system\users\olduseraccount
System\library\application support
System\library\audio
I think that would solve most issues there are hundreds of folders with presets from plugins that have installed with only my old account as read write not admins?
Thanks again Niel
Ross

Executed "sudo chown -R admin /" by mistake. how do i check everything?

So "sudo chown -R admin /" was executed by mistake on an OSX 10.8.5 machine that's connected with a multiuser network. In addition to screwing up the local machine, it may have effected many other things since / includes /Network, /Volumes, possible non-Mac mounts, etc.
I was looking in system.log, and it doesn't show which files had their permissions actually changed. Is there any log on the machine where the command was executed, which lists all the files under / that chown was applied to before it was stopped? And would it show what the ownership was changed from? I'd like to go through that list and know the extent of the damage.
Thanks.

There is no log for that operation. Boot into your recovery volume and run Repair Permissions. It will take a while. You will have to re-run that command with the appropriate user on each user home directory. Some applications, particularly those that use DRM, will be scrambled and will have to be reinstalled. After repairing permissions and fixing the users, login as a user and try to run the expensive applications. Any that need reinstallation will alert you to that fact.

Sudo chown root:admin / command information

I would like to know if the use of this command before an OSX update would affect the operation of my computer after the 10.6.7 update. I had to use this command (suggested by vea1083) to fix a directory ownership disassociation following the iTunes 10.2.1 Update which slowed my MacBook Pro boot up speed by twice of the time. The following command was used to fix the issue and it worked successfully:
*sudo chown root:admin /*
Thank you for any assistance in this matter.

Thank You for your responses, besides noticing that my thread has been moved to another forum let me give you a little insight on my decision to call in this command in the terminal window.
It all started 1 month ago, I performed an iTunes update and to my surprise, my boot time went up from 22 seconds to almost 50 seconds. I cleared my log in items and repaired my permissions, with no success, so I had to take the sledgehammer approach and reinstall OSX and get the combo update to bring back my computer to OSX 10.6.6, after performing the reinstallation, my boot time went back to normal (22 seconds). Thinking that this was only a one time issue, when iTunes 10.2.0 came out I performed the iTunes update and again I was presented with the slow boot up issue after updating iTunes, angered by the fact that the same issue resurfaced, again I performed another permissions repair and reboot, and using my Mac in Safeboot mode failed, I had to again reinstall OSX again. Now hopeless, when the iTunes update 10.2.1 update came out, I did again the freaking update and boom again the same problem only this time I refused to reinstall OSX (I deny to see myself reinstalling OSX every single time I had to update iTunes). Fortunately I found a fix candidate in this Macrumors thread (http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1109887) where some MacBook Airs were reporting a similar boot time slowdown after the users performed an iTunes Update. Here was there where one user got the suggested the *sudo chown root:admin /* command:
http://rifers.org/blogs/gbevin/2009/9/20/slowstartupshutdownsnowleopard
I had hold off my 10.6.7 update pending a before update permissions fix and time machine backup to keep my computer from running into more troubles that I am already had.
Thank you for your understanding and suggestions

DUMB MOVE: sudo chown -R notroot:notroot /*

The title pretty much says it all. I changed the owner/group of everything below / to something other than root. Commands suddenly stopped working.
I rebooted, logged in as root and tried to make things better by performing the same command, but this time setting everything to root except for my home directory. I'm sure not everything in the filesystem was originally set to root:root but hopefully this would get me closer to a working system. Unfortunately sudo still wouldn't work, giving the message:
sudo: must be setuid root
I set the setuid flag on the sudo file. Sudo now works.
Next step... Under my usual username I tried to start X. X no work...
Cannot move old logfile ("/var/log/Xorg.0.log" to "/var/log/Xorg.0.log.old"
So, I set the setuid flag on /usr/bin/Xorg and now X starts up great. However, I get the feeling this setuid business might be a kludge, allowing said programs to effectively run as that program file's owner (now root). Now, I'm thinking that the fewer things I have running as root, the better. As such, my current fix doesn't seem ideal.
My screw-up didn't involve messing with the permissions in any way; I just changed the _ownership_ of everything in a very bad way. So if it's an ownership issue why should I be messing with setuid flags? Are setuid flags somehow turned off when ownership of a file is changed or is this setuid flag business just an alternate solution/workaround to my ownership problem?
More importantly, is there a reasonably painless way that I can restore all my installed packages and their associated files to their original ownerships. This would basically be a reinstall using the list of packages I already have installed as a reference, saving me the trouble of manually selecting all my currently installed packages. I looked at the pacman man page but nothing jumped out at me. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Last edited by battlepanic (2009-09-22 22:02:16)

*lol* Welcome to the club - been there, done that - and it is _not_ recommended!
I believe I resorted to a reinstall in the end - it just caused too many problems.
So take a bite out of the sour apple, back up your home directory and do a complete reinstall.
And ... I bet you 10 to 1 you aren't gonna do the same again - ever!!

[SOLVED] I did a dumb thing... (chmod/chown)

Hi all, hope this is the right section,
So I decided that I was tired of authenticating when I wanted to change some files for my SLiM theme, and decided to add permissions to my user.. on the entire share folder. Well, here's what I ran:
[naut@arch /usr]$ sudo chown -Rv root:naut share/ && sudo chmod -Rv 664 share/
Yep. So after I did that I noticed that xfce stopped working properly; all of my icons, panels, etc, were showing as follows: ▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖
I immediately tried to revert the change my chowning back to root:root, and setting most files back to 644, but it had no effect. I logged out and logged back in to see if it was a temporary thing, but when I logged back in, even more items were showing ▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖▖. I switched to another tty and chmoded all of /usr/share to 777... now I know that's generally a bad idea but when I logged back in, I did see that it at least went back to normal functionality.
So my question becomes, how can I know what dirs/files need what permissions? I'd like to get it back to where I have the least permission required for everything to work properly.
Last edited by naut (2014-05-09 14:56:16)

644 broke things because directories need execute permissions to be traversable.
Unfortunately, /usr/share is a grab-bag of permissions:
# find /usr/share -type f -exec ls -l {} + | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | sort | uniq -c
2879 -r--r--r--
4 -r-xr-xr-x
49229 -rw-r--r--
12 -rw-r-xr--
143 -rw-rw-r--
277 -rwxr-xr-x
3 -rwxrwxr-x
You'd probably be safe enough to set all files to 644 and all directories to 755, but you might want to check with pacman -Qkk and reinstall any packages that complain about permissions mismatches. This won't fix everything though, as some packages still pre-date MTREE files.

Firefox 19 fails to launch unless sudo

Hi,
Before a recent update, firefox was running fine on my fedora 18. After the update (via yum), firefox will no longer launch unless it is launched as sudo. Initially I thought there was something corrupted in my profile directory ~/.mozilla/firefox/profile.ini and so deleted my ~/.mozilla directory so that it can create a new one. Unfortunately that doesn't do it.
I still get the error:
Access was denied while trying to open files in your profile directory.
I see that when I started the firefox, it recreated a new ~/.mozilla/firefox directory but didn't create profile.ini. I looked at the permissions and see nothing wrong with it:
[jade@localhost ~]$ firefox
Error: Access was denied while trying to open files in your profile directory.
[jade@localhost ~]$ ls -ld .mozilla/
drwxrwxr-x 4 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 .mozilla/
[jade@localhost ~]$ ls -l .mozilla/
total 8
drwxrwxr-x 3 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 extensions
drwx------ 3 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 firefox
I don't see anything wrong with permissions. I see that I own the directory .mozilla and subdirectories) but I'll go ahead and executed the chown recommended from other sites:
[jade@localhost ~]$ sudo chown -R jade:jade ~/.mozilla/
[sudo] password for jade:
[jade@localhost ~]$ sudo chown -R jade:jade ~/.mozilla/firefox
[jade@localhost ~]$ sudo chown -R jade:jade ~/.mozilla/firefox/*
[jade@localhost ~]$ firefox
Error: Access was denied while trying to open files in your profile directory.
But still the error persists. Again, I'm listing the permissions of the .mozilla and its subdirectories:
[jade@localhost ~]$ ls -ld .mozilla/
drwxrwxr-x 4 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 .mozilla/
[jade@localhost ~]$ ls -la .mozilla/
total 16
drwxrwxr-x 4 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 .
drwxrw-r-- 46 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 19:06 ..
drwxrwxr-x 3 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 extensions
drwx------ 3 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 firefox
[jade@localhost ~]$ ls -la .mozilla/firefox/
total 12
drwx------ 3 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 .
drwxrwxr-x 4 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 ..
drwx------ 2 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 Crash Reports
[jade@localhost ~]$ ls -la .mozilla/firefox/Crash\ Reports/
total 12
drwx------ 2 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 .
drwx------ 3 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 ..
-rw------- 1 jade jade 10 Feb 28 18:43 InstallTime20130219173943
[jade@localhost ~]$ ls -la .mozilla/extensions/
total 12
drwxrwxr-x 3 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 .
drwxrwxr-x 4 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 ..
drwxrwxr-x 2 jade jade 4096 Feb 28 18:43 {ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}
[jade@localhost ~]$ ls -la .mozilla/extensions/\{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384\}/
total 8
Could someone help me? I really don't want to have to run firefox as sudo, but right now that's the only way I can run it. Can't run it as a regular user (jade in this case).
I also remove and re-installed firefox (via yum) and the same problem occurs.

Had the same problem today on Ubuntu 10.04 with Firefox nightly build. I tried all of these things too (short of creating a new user). Eventually a ls -alR | grep root showed that permissions on some files in ~ were not being changed. This led me to find the ~/.cache folder which contained a mozilla/firefox folder. chown -R me:me mozilla resolved the issue.

Can't get rid of files with sudo rm: Operation not permitted?!?

I just noticed that I have a few directories in my files that have a username of "unknown" from GetInfo (username of 314112960 from ls -l) and can't be touched by me. I opened Terminal, and tried to "sudo chown" and "sudo chmod" them; both came back with "Operation not permitted". Can someone tell me how it's possible that su is not allowed to touch them, and more importantly, how I go about civilizing them so that I can see what's there and get rid of it? Thanks,
Mike

ls -lod yourfile
If it says schg, then you have to reboot into single
user's mode (hold down command-s while the machine
reboots), then run fsck (the prompts will suggest
what to type, so you don't have to memorize it here),
then mount the file system, run fsck again if there
was a problem reported the first time, and when you
get the all clear, then navigate to where the file
is, issue the command
chflags noschg yourfile
rm -R yourfile
and then run fsck one more time (it helps to be
paranoid) and then reboot.
Thanks for the specific instructions! I did that and here's what happened.
The first fsck said everything was fine. The chflags was ok as well. I tried to chown both directories then, to see what was there, and the first time it failed with a "operation not allowed" error. I then did rm -R on one of the directories, and it disappeared. I then tried the chown again on the other one, and it worked! Weird. Maybe there's some latency here somehow. Anyway, I decided I wanted the whole thing gone and I did an rm -Rf on it, and it deleted almost everything, except for one file, which was a link to a nonexistent file (it had an ls -l of "lrwxrwxrwx" (is that a hard link?). When I try to delete that one, it says "no such file or directory". I thought rm was supposed to delete the link, not the file the link is pointing to! Anyway, I couldn't think of any way to get rid of it - it just won't let me do it. Anyone have any ideas how to get rid of this link? It's sitting at the bottom of a long tree of directories and I'd now like the whole thing gone... Oh and then I fsck'd again, which said no error, and I rebooted. Finder won't let me delete it either (error 43, file cannot be found). What do you think?
Thanks,
Mike

[SOLVED] I made sudo chmod -R ~/ by mystake

I cannot enter my system anymore. I confused the root directory with home.
Now when I try to enter into my system it complains. The KDE desktop doesn't fully load.
It creates a window where it says: Call to lnusertemp failed (temporary directory full?) Check your installation.
Is there anyway to fix it?
Last edited by doblerone (2014-03-18 08:52:49)

I try to fix it by making:
sudo chown david:users /home/david
I rebooted and at least the desktop loads with some problems still. It says in a lot of windows that it can't write into the configuration file : /home/david/.kde4........ Contact with your admin

[SOLVED] How to chown files in mounted drive?

I'm trying to mount my 2nd hard drive (used as a data partition by a prior Win7 installation) as user.
In /etc/fstab I have:
/dev/sdb5 /mnt/win auto user,noauto 1 1
I can then run "mount /dev/sdb5" without sudo. But it sets the owner and group of /mnt/win to root:root and permissions to -rwx------
Running "sudo chown -R ian:users /mnt/win" only changes the directories, not the files. I can't find anything in the chown manpage to indicate an option I'm missing. Can anybody help me out? Not much point mounting the partition if I can't even read them.
Thanks.
Last edited by ibrunton (2011-07-26 14:33:56)

ibrunton wrote:There's nothing in 'man mount' about dmask or fmask...
Hmmm
[karol@black ~]$ man mount | grep -A2 "dmask=value"
dmask=value
Set the umask applied to directories only. The default is the umask of the cur‐
rent process. The value is given in octal.
[karol@black ~]$ man mount | grep -A2 "fmask=value"
fmask=value
Set the umask applied to regular files only. The default is the umask of the
current process. The value is given in octal.
I use
mount -o gid=users,uid=1000,dmask=0002,fmask=0113 /dev/sdb1 /media/usb/
and get
[karol@black ~]$ ls -l /media/
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2011-01-10 cd
drwxrwxr-x 13 karol users 8192 1970-01-01 usb
You can find your uid (your user id) in /etc/passwd and your gid (group - i.e. 'users' - id) - in /etc/group.
Last edited by karol (2011-07-26 14:28:23)

Chown: Invalid Argument

I'm trying to change ownership of some files from root to my user.
Most of my files belong to user oliversa and group of the same name:
-rw-r--r-- 1 oliversa oliversa 171B Dec 25 22:21 TODO
drwxr-xr-x 13 oliversa oliversa 442B Dec 31 11:31 code
drwxr-xr-x 5 oliversa oliversa 170B Dec 18 16:46 data
drwxr-xr-x 12 oliversa oliversa 408B Feb 22 17:47 design
drwxr-xr-x 9 oliversa oliversa 306B Dec 21 10:38 httpdocs
drwxr-xr-x 5 oliversa oliversa 170B Feb 27 19:33 script
I want to change these to be the same:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 539B Dec 21 11:14 sync
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 86B Dec 21 11:11 sync_files
-r-------- 1 root wheel 9B Dec 18 11:39 sync_pass
So I type:
$ chown oliversa:oliversa *
chown: oliversa: Invalid argument
$ sudo chown oliversa:oliversa *
Password:
chown: oliversa: Invalid argument
This is odd, I think.
Additionally oliversa doesn't exist in /etc/passwd:
$ grep oliversa /etc/passwd
$

Are you sure your username and group name are 'oliversa'?
The reason I ask is that 'ls' is probably only showing the first 8 characters of the username and group name - this is the traditional limit in UNIX systems.
However, if your username is really 'oliversaunders', then that is what you need to pass to chown.
Which version of the OS are you on? There are ways of finding the real username and group name, but it varies depending on the OS version.

Operation not permitted during chown (nouchg doesn't help)

I've wanted to move my old Time Machine backup files from previous MacBook onto another external drive to leave it unmodified and being able to recall it by option-pressing Time Machine icon. In previous system installation my user had id (id -u) 502, my current user from current Lion install has id 501. I've wanted to chown backup files from 502 to 501 (sudo find PATH -uid 502 -print0 | xargs -0 chown USERNAME) but I've received when chowning directory
chown: Documents/: Operation not permitted
I've looked up some threads in discussions and I've tried to modify some HFS specific arguments (nouimmutable, nouchg, nouappnd and others), but it also gave me no luck.
Below you can find some ls'es from one of directories.
$ ls -lO
drwx---rwx@ 31 502 staff - 1326 18 lip 09:02 Documents
$ ls -delO Documents/
drwx---rwx@ 31 502 staff - 1326 18 lip 09:02 Documents/
0: group:everyone deny add_file,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,writeattr,writeextattr,chown
1: group:everyone deny delete
2: user:sup allow list,search,readattr,readextattr,readsecurity
3: group:admin allow list,search,readattr,readextattr,readsecurity
$ stat Documents
234881038 11351802 drwx---rwx 31 (502) staff 0 1326 "Nov 6 15:17:01 2011" "Jul 18 09:02:44 2011" "Nov 6 15:12:57 2011" "Jul 22 02:24:04 2009" 4096 0 0 Documents
$ ls -@l
drwx---rwx@ 31 502 staff 1326 18 lip 09:02 Documents
com.apple.metadata:_kTimeMachineNewestSnapshot 50
com.apple.metadata:_kTimeMachineOldestSnapshot 50
$ sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/Ragnarok\ Timemachine/ -d
error (25) from /Volumes/Ragnarok Timemachine/. (Inappropriate ioctl for device)
$ sudo chown `id -un` Documents
chown: Documents: Operation not permitted
Any ideas on what I'm missing?

Linc Davis wrote:
You can't modify Time Machine backup files in any way. A determined effort to do so will destroy the repository.
Thx Davis. Is there any way of coping these files, changing owner and also being browsable by Time Machine (browse other Time Machine disks)?

Chown: changing ownership of u01: operation not permitted.

Hi
I am dual booting Window 8 and Oracle Linux 6 on my system. Both OS is working perfectly. I have one NTFS partition "/dev/sda4" which gets mounted with no issues, when using mount command.
In my / directory of linux system I have created u01 folder. I changed the ownership of this u01 folder from root:root to oracle:oinstall (oracle user and oinstall group). Now when I am mounting /dev/sda4 to u01 using:
sudo mount /dev/sda4 /u01
It is getting mounted perfectly but the ownership of u01 is getting changed from oracle:oinstall to root:root again.
Now I am trying to change it back to oracle:oinstall using:
sudo chown oracle:oinstall /u01
But it is showing error: "chown: changing ownership of u01: operation not permitted. "
Note: My username is oracle and group is oinstall. I have put oracle user in /etc/sudoers file:
oracle ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL
Thanks
Nitish

Dude,
Actually I wanted to install oracle database in my linux system. I thought of putting database binaries in my NTFS partition. Everything was worknig fine. I was able to install oracle database such that the binaries are in NTFS partition.
The only problem was that I was not able to change ownership from root:root to oracle:oinstall. This is recommended by Oracle.
It doesnt matter you are root user or any user you wont be able to change ownsership.
I found out the probelm. Thing is that, no user can change ownership of NTFS or FAT system. It will always be mounted as root:root. I formatted the partition in EXT2 format and mounted it to /u01 folder. It was root:root then I changed it to oracle:oinstall by chown command and it was successfull.
If you have any other idea or workaround please let me know.
Thanks
Nitish

What do the following SUDO-Commands mean and do?

Hey Everybody,
I did google these two commands but I cannot find a straight answer which is understandable for me. Can someone please explain to me in plain English what they do?
1. "sudo chmod -RN ~"
2. "sudo chown -R `id -un` ~"
My second question is: After I have executed these 2 commands, will there be a problem or danger to my system if I won't boot up off the Leopard DVD and click the "Reset" button in the "Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs" section? Because this reset seems not possible on my machine.
Thank you very much for your answers!
AirMcEnroe

I'll start off by asking if you have a problem that you are trying to solve, or if you are just having fun with Google? The sudo command is a very dangerous command, and using the -R option allows the computer to multiply your mistakes with amazing speed.
I did google these two commands but I cannot find a straight answer which is understandable for me. Can someone please explain to me in plain English what they do?
1. "sudo chmod -RN ~"
sudo says run the following command as if you were the super user (the all powerful). It will prompt for your password (assuming you are an 'admin' user). You will see nothing while typing the password.
chmod is used to change file permissions (see "man chmod").
The tilda ~ says start with your home directory.
-R says recursively process every file and directory under the specified starting directory (in this case you specified ~ your home directory).
-N says remove any Access Control Lists (ACL) found.
Not sure why you want to do this. It seems like a very big hammer and some of those ACLs may be service a valuable function, such as protecting you from shooting yourself in the foot, or enabling specific needed permissions on newly created files, etc...
And if you happen to fumble finger entering the starting directory ~, you could destroy ACLs outside of your home directory tree and destroy critical OS ACLs.
Make sure you have a very good full system backup before you take aim at your foot.
2. "sudo chown -R `id -un` ~"
chown changes the ownership of files and directories.
-R says recursively process every file and directory under the specified starting directory (in this case you specified ~ your home directory).
`id -un` obtains your short username, the `...` says substitute the output from id -un onto the chown command line.
So this command is going to walk your home directory tree and change the ownership of every file and directory it finds and force you to be the owner.
Again a very big hammer, and one that if you specify the wrong starting directory will turn your Mac into a paper weight. Make sure you have a very good full backup before you start.
My second question is: After I have executed these 2 commands, will there be a problem or danger to my system if I won't boot up off the Leopard DVD and click the "Reset" button in the "Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs" section? Because this reset seems not possible on my machine.
By the way, Terminal, Unix, X11, and command line command, ssh, rsync, etc... questions are best asked in the Mac OS X Technologies > Unix Forum
<http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=735>

Unhappy sudo chown -R myuser /

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