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I just made a huuuge mistake. I typed the following as root: 

chown chris ./

So it change perm to everything! Now I have problem booting because of these permissions. How do I fix it?

Oli
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Gervazy Lolex
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2 Answers2

11

Given your response to the other answer, it sounds like you've run a very different command. Both /. ./ variants would be quite easy to reverse but it sounds like you've actually run something with recursion, like chown -r /.

This would systematically rewrite the permissions on the entire system. It's much more destructive and almost impossible for a beginner to unravel.

Assuming that's the case —or you're unable to confirm exactly what you did— my standing suggestion is you backup any data from a LiveCD and reinstall. It might sound a little severe but honestly, picking through every permission is really hard.

In comparison, reinstalling is very easy.
Even more so when you haven't been using Ubuntu for very long.

Community
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Oli
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3

Boot into recovery mode: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RecoveryMode

Mount / read-write and change the owner of / back to root:

mount -o remount,rw /
chown root /
Julian Ladisch
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