[conspire] newbie question on file permissions of home directory

[mark at weisler-saratoga-ca.us]

Kai wrote...


> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [conspire] newbie question on file permissions of home
> directory
> From: "K Sandoval" <indigo.kai at gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, February 23, 2008 1:56 pm
> To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
> 
> 
> Let me preface my question with I am a newbie...
> 
> I have a spare hard drive. I have Ubuntu 7-04 installed on it and
> everything was running fine.
> I was reading one of my Ubuntu how to books and the author suggested
> changing the permissions on the home directory.
> (Big Mistake, I have learned my lesson dont change file permissions
> until you KNOW What you are doing)
> 
> home/student/
> 
> Well I did that and now I can not boot into the GNOME.  I can boot
> into the command line as user "student".
> 
> I am receiving the following error message.
> "The GNOME session manager was unable to lock the file
> '/home/student/.ICDauthority' please report this as a GNOME bug.
> Sometimes this error may occur if the file directory is unwritabgle
> you could try logging in via the fail safe session and ensure that it
> is."
> 
> I have attempted to login using both fail safe session options (GNOME
> and command line) and I receive the exact same error message.
> 
> Is there some way to switch the permissions on the /home/student/
> folder back to what it was.
> 
> 1) Owner
> Folder: Create and Delete
> File access:  ----
> 
> 2) Group Student
> Folder: Access files
> File access:  ----
> 
> Other Users
> Folder: Acess files
> File access:  ---
> 
> and Execute - Allow executing files as program.
> 
> - Kai
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> 
> Ms.Kai Sandoval
> 
> http://www.linkedin.com/pub/1/677/a41
> http://people.tribe.net/da12c6fd-0b2e-4ba6-ac41-b760bdbe9675

I'm not sure about the "spare drive" part but...
If you want to change permissions on a directory here is an example
showing how...
Become root somehow...

Here's a listing of my home directory with a file owned by root; I want
to change it to being owned by me.

$ls -la
...
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root      4096 Feb 23 14:25 silliness/
drwx------  2 mark mark      4096 Feb 21 15:43 .ssh/
drwxr-xr-x  4 mark mark      4096 Nov 10 07:31 StormyFerry/

Use the chown (change owner) command. The -R means to recursively change
ownership for everything inside the directory.

[root at localhost mark]# chown -R mark:mark silliness/
[root at localhost mark]# ls -la
total 2031848
drwx------ 39 mark mark      4096 Feb 23 14:25 ./
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root      4096 Jan 21 11:13 ../

-rw-rw-r--  1 mark mark 456908800 Jan 25 12:56
sidux-2007-04.5-200712260120-eros_xmas-kde-lite-i386.iso
drwxr-xr-x  2 mark mark      4096 Feb 23 14:25 silliness/
drwx------  2 mark mark      4096 Feb 21 15:43 .ssh/
drwxr-xr-x  4 mark mark      4096 Nov 10 07:31 StormyFerry/
drwxrwxr-x  2 mark mark      4096 Jan 25 18:48 .superkaramba/
...
[root at localhost mark]#                                                  


Hope that helps.