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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Screwed up permissions, ownership, attributes on large fs. How to reset? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have been playing around with chmod, chown, setfacl and special bits trying to get multiple system/full users in same group correct access permissions to my media collection.

But I've messed it up somehow and now I'm having weird problems that are hard to track.

I would like to set my whole collection back to the defaults.

What is the best way to do this?

One problem I've had when making changes to so many files is the process seems to go forever without completing. Eventually it gets killed so my filesystem has variable attributes throughout. how can this be worked around?

I want everything to be owned by myuser, group media, everything else default I will sort it from there once I have a fresh slate.

And is there a way to backup these attributes only? I don't have enough storage to backup the files themselves.

It is Debian with ext4 filesystem.

Edit to add: Media collection is on its own separate drive/filesystem; this has no impact on anything else on the computer.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

An mp3 or a pdf has no business doing anything. The whole point of file permissions is to prevent the user from accidentally doing stuff they don't mean to do.

If you downloaded a malicious file that had some code in it, you could accidentally execute the code. Or maybe some legitimate code that means one thing in the file format but a different thing when executed accidentally.

Even excluding the possibility of malice, I think it would screw up things like tab completion to have every file be an executable. Or if I double click in the GUI file manager, will it try (and fail) to run the .avi as an application instead of opening in VLC?

I'm sure you could get a more comprehensive answer if you post a new thread or search on the web.