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I accidentally run the following command as root chown mike -Rf / backups the point is that I added a space between / and backups my mistake, I stopped the command after 1-2 seconds, how can I recover from this? I have problems with DirectAdmin right now for example when accessing it I recive the error:

Unable to determine Usertype
user.conf needs to be repaired
http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=456

Or I stopped recieving emails, I dont even know what else is messed up right now...

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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Eldar
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    Since it sounds like you have backups, I suggest comparing ownership info with the backups. – derobert May 01 '13 at 15:53
  • Note that the `chown` may also have cleared any setuid or setgid bits on the affected files, even if they were originally owned by root. – Keith Thompson May 01 '13 at 22:25

4 Answers4

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There is no way to change this back without reverting to your backup as the system does not keep track of revision of ownership.

Best is to make a backup now, so any further changes can be rolled back.

Reinstalling the packages on your system probably resolves most of the ownership problems. On Debian/Ubuntu I would do:

apt-get install --reinstall package

on an rpm based system something like rpm -Uvh --force package.rpm for anything that is giving trouble. If properly setup a package will not overwrite configuration files that you changed.

If you have another similar system, or a backup you can retrieve original ownership information from that an apply to your system. First make list of files and directories you are interested in using:

find / -user mike

and use that list to find not-mike-owned files in the backup or similar system.

Anthon
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  • I suggest you to **check [this answer](http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/68803/)** about package reinstallation under a Debian based system. – Totor May 01 '13 at 23:09
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That depends on the OS you are running.

If it is Solaris 10 and older, you can fix all the owner issues affecting files and directories belonging to a package with the following command:

pkgchk -f

With Solaris 11, that would be:

pkg fix

I believe AIX has a similar package fix command.

If you run a rpm based OS (Red Hat, Fedora and the likes), you should be able to run

rpm -aV

to detect the files and directories with discrepancies against the package database. You might then fix them by running:

rpm --setugids <package-name>

But you would need to pass each affected package name. Alternatively, you might simply run:

for package in $(rpm -qa); do rpm --setugids $package; done

If you are running a debian based OS, I'm afraid file ownership isn't stored in the package database so you would need to either use your backup if any as a reference to restore the ownership, or find a similar system for the same.

jlliagre
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2

I did exactly the same mistake, by a typographic error at the end of the sentence 

chown -R root:root /folder/subfolder /

I didn't realize the space before the slash :(

Hopefully, asking here, finally I solved the problem, taking owner and group from another installed Debian server. In that server, I did:

find / -not -path '/proc/*' -not -path '/var/www/*' -not -path '/home/*' ! \(  -name root -o  -group root \) | xargs stat --format 'chown %U:%G %n' | sort -k 2,3 > chown_owner_and_group.sh
chmod +X chown_owner_and_group.sh

Then, I copy the file to the server where I need to restore the owner and group of files, and did an:

./chown_owner_and_group.sh
Rafael Linux User
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I'm afraid that the only solution you have is to compare with another installation of the same distribution and reset the owners correctly.

Spack
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