The trick is that you loose access to every file on the system. chmod is also a file. And ls. And sudo. You see where it’s going. System will kinda work after this command, but rebooting (which by a coincidence is a common action for “fixing” things) will reveal that system is dead.
Yep. You could run chmod again to fix it (from a different OS / rescue USB), but that would leave all the permissions in a messy state - having everything set to 777 is incredibly insecure, and will also likely break many apps/scripts that expect more restrictive permissions. So the only way to fix this properly would be to reinstall your OS/restore from backups.
sudo chmod 000 -R /
is very fun way of braking your system and is not widely known 🙂Can you recover from that?
I imagine if you can mount from a busybox possibly
Then figure out the correct perms.
Eh, just hit it with the 777 and pray. Then swear at it some more.
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Boot from a usb stick, mount the fs, use the live environment’s chmod command to fix stuff.
I think you’ll need to change passwd and shadow, maybe a few other files, but besides that it’ll mostly work.
This is the traditional method.
Yeah that’s the painful part. A backup would be key here
What does this do? nobody can read any file? would sudo chmod 777 fix it at least to a usable system?
The trick is that you loose access to every file on the system.
chmod
is also a file. Andls
. Andsudo
. You see where it’s going. System will kinda work after this command, but rebooting (which by a coincidence is a common action for “fixing” things) will reveal that system is dead.Yep. You could run chmod again to fix it (from a different OS / rescue USB), but that would leave all the permissions in a messy state - having everything set to 777 is incredibly insecure, and will also likely break many apps/scripts that expect more restrictive permissions. So the only way to fix this properly would be to reinstall your OS/restore from backups.
How are you gonna run chmod when you don’t have permissions to use it anymore?
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