/etc/ permissions

Derek Broughton news at pointerstop.ca
Fri Aug 26 16:39:47 UTC 2005


Charles Yao wrote:

> Well there was not any other workaround for my  case 
> so I believe what 

Of COURSE there was!  This is linux. Rule #1: "there's _always_ another
way".  Rule #2: "there's probably a better way".

Always, always, always, if you find you can't do what you're trying to do
_assume_ you're doing it wrong and look for a better solution.  I'm sorry
if I sound a little harsh, but it's to stop you doing something stupid like
I did a couple of days ago.  I had a ~/bin directory.  It was full of stuff
that shouldn't be there, so I deleted it.  When I discovered that I
_couldn't_ delete it, because all of the files were owned by "root", I used
sudo.  oops.  Turned out I'd created a symlink to /usr/sbin.  Two big
mistakes - what was I doing putting a symlink there (actually, I remember -
I wanted to temporarily access it through Samba, and couldn't be bothered
to go to the trouble of creating a share. At least if I'd done it
under /tmp - which was shared - the symlink would have been deleted at boot
time), and I didn't clue in to why I couldn't delete those files. 
Fortunately, I had another partition with a pretty complete /usr/sbin -
good enough to get me to the point where I could use aptitude and dpkg to
reinstall all the known packages that put files there.

If you'd taken the time to figure out (a) how to modify your sources.list to
get the package from ubuntu, and (b) how to install the package, it would
have been done automatically and you wouldn't have messed up your /etc

> I did was the best solution.

It wasn't and you really, really, should put it back the way it was.

> Besides it I only modified a few folders 
> not the entire FS

_you_ said you modified the FS.  However, even a "few folders" is a very bad
idea.  Have I stressed this enough? :-)
-- 
derek





More information about the ubuntu-users mailing list