/etc/ permissions

Charles Yao yaocharlesc at gmail.com
Sat Aug 27 02:40:05 UTC 2005


I actually posted to find a better way, if I did I would have used it :)

On 8/27/05, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
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