chmod problem

[Alf-Ivar Holm]

Matthew S-H <hellzfury at gmail.com> writes:

> I was changing the permissions of everything in a directory inside
> my home folder recursively, and I meant to type "chmod 777 .a*", but
> I accidentally typed "chmod 777 .*".  [...]  
> Now everything in my home folder with a starting letter before "L"
> (i guess it was doing it in alphabetic order) [...]

As the ".*" is expanded by the shell, you can get the list of files
given to chmod by issuing "echo .*" in the same directory. Your
assumption about sorting is right (at least if you were using
bash(1)).  More info here:

    http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/sect_03_04.html#sect_03_04_08

> Note that my last backup was a LONG time ago.  I'd rather deal with
> unrestricted permissions than with losing all of my recent work.

Your backup may still provide you with the permissions of the files
that existed earlier.  With a little bit of shell programming you
might restore most of the file permissions to their "before disaster"
state.

	Affi