Hi all,

I believe i messed things up and would greatly appreciate some input...

I wanted to change group on a directory in public_html but instead ran the command at root level, recursively of course. I got a few "Operation not permitted" errors, but most files and directories now has the group www-data.

This is the command that was executed:

# chgrp -R www-data /srv/www/example.com/public_html/media *

Is this a FUBAR situation, ie start from scratch or can I rectify this somehow by setting the group to root recursively or something?

Thanks,

Was this command ran as root?

Assuming you ran this command as the root user, you're shit out of luck. Time for a backup and reimage of your Linode.

Create a Linode in the same datacenter, restore your latest good backup to it, boot up the rescue mode, then:

backup# find / -xdev -printf "chgrp %g %p\n" > /tmp/doh.sh

Copy /tmp/doh.sh over to your broken node and:

failboat# sh /tmp/doh.sh

It should get most everything. You'll want to check for the stragglers with:

failboat# find / -xdev -group www-data

If you don't have a backup, you're FUBAR.

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/* TODO: need to add signature to posts */

Wow, that's a nice trick, hoopycat... gotta remember this.
(Yes, I do backups.)

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rsk, providing useless advice on the Internet since 2005.

That is an amazing trick, very cool, will have to remember that.

I suppose I might as well mention that I haven't actually tried this, so it may or may not work. But it looks like it does. (find is generally amazing.)

Thanks for the replies. The answers were pretty much what I expected, although I had hoped for something else. As it stands I just signed up with Linode and got things up an running, so backups are nonexisting. For the data it's no problem, it's just that I have to redo the setup all over again, but I guess that is a good learning experience.

That I used the root account was a correct assumption by the way.

Anyways, thanks again. I am sure I will have reasons to come back to the forums, which I have actually followed since I sign up. Despite the setback I am really happy with Linode and the service. Everything went really smooth up until yesterday.

Cheers