John Lindal’s Blog

chown

Ah, the joys of working in a root shell. I just finished cleaning up the mess left behind by the command chown -R x.y $(z)/, where z was undefined. Yes, I know just as well as the next guy that you have to be really careful when running a root shell. I’ve heard the stories about rm -rf /. But stuff happens anyway sometimes…

At least it was only chown. I only had to go through the entire file system and put the ownership back the way it was — and put back a few sticky bits, of course. Thankfully, I hit Ctrl-C before it got to /home! Most of the rest of the file system is owned by root