[CoLoCo] permission question

[Jim Hutchinson]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 1:16 PM, Neal McBurnett <neal at bcn.boulder.co.us>
wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 11:28:31AM -0600, Jim Hutchinson wrote:
> > They say a little knowledge is dangerous. I think I'm finding out
> > how true that is. I was logged in as one kid trying to open a file
>
> Yes indeed - it is dangerous to play around with recursive
> file-modifying programs without knowing what they are doing or what
> actually needs to be done....


Well, goofing up is how you learn. I'm much more careful on a system with
important stuff.


>
> > in the others home directory. It wasn't working and in my experience
> > you can usually open files in others /home. That seems to be the
>
> What application are you dealing with?


Originally, I just wanted access to a text file which for some reason
wouldn't open. In retrospect I don't think it was perms issue and changing
perms to try and get around the problem not only didn't help but goofed up
things. I wasn't really trying to share files - just access the contents of
one file.


>
> I'd be leery of attempts to "fix" what you've got now, given the
> number of random changes you've made.  Asking the system to go back to
> "default" permissions is not possible since you may well have changed
> the defaults along the way, and some changes may depend on others.
> Thus the importance of backups.
>

There wasn't much to backup in this case so that wasn't an issue. I could
have just reinstalled but I've done enough of that lately and this seemed
"fixable". In the end I just used Paul's command to fix the main account and
then I deleted the other users and added them back. All I lost were a few
theme settings. The few files there were already backup from before when I
installed Hardy.

Thanks for the help all - especially Paul. I got this fixed and consider the
issue solved.

-jim

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