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chmod -R hit me, again... Anyone else who faced these sys-admin woopsies? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by 0_0j@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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sudo's Hall of pain

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[–] joyjoy@lemm.ee 20 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Expectation: apply chmod to all subdirectories.

Reality: Remove read permission

For chmod, chown, chattr, etc, -R is used to recurse subdirectories.

[–] kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's what -R does in chmod as well? I feel like something here is going completely over my head. Or are you-all using another version of chmod?

[–] joyjoy@lemm.ee 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

chmod -r uses symbolic mode. Specifically it removes read permissions for the file. Other forms include w for write and x for executable. + can be used to add permission.

https://ss64.com/bash/chmod.html

[–] kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Aha! I didn't get that you meant the issue was accidentally using -r instead of -R since both you and OP wrote the upper case one.

I'm a lot more used to -R so I instead get caught off by commands where that means something other than recursive :)

I mostly use symbolic mode and honestly don't get why everyone else seems to use octal all the time.

[–] joyjoy@lemm.ee 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

People probably confuse it with tools like cp, rm, ls, etc as they use -r for file recursion.

[–] kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 8 months ago

ls -r actually lists entries in reverse order! It needs -R as well.

cp and rm accept either.

Looking at some man pages the only commands I found where -R didn't work were scp and gzip where it doesn't do anything, and rsync where it's "use relative path names".

(Caveat: BSD utils might be different, who knows what those devils get up to!)