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Questions tagged [ownership]

File ownership is a way to manage files of different users and share files between users of same groups. Every file in Linux is managed by a specific user and a group. The chmod command helps to define file permissions separately for user, group and others.

174 questions
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How to change owner of folder to current user recursively?

Using sudo nautilus I created some folders and I want to get rid of root permission on them. But I have many and I want to do it to a entire directory and its containing folders. So how to allow read/write to current user to all files and folders…
Vitor Abella
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Sudo doesn't work: "/etc/sudoers is owned by uid 1000, should be 0"

When I type a sudo command into the terminal it shows the following error: sudo: /etc/sudoers is owned by uid 1000, should be 0 sudo: no valid sudoers sources found, quitting sudo: unable to initialize policy plugin How do I fix this?
Rasel Khan
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4 answers

Permission denied in FTP even though I'm the owner

Okay, so I've tried my best at finding the answer to this by searching and looking through possible duplicates, but I just can't so forgive me if it's out there somewhere anyways. My issue is as follows. I've set the owner of /var/www to…
Tjita1
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6 answers

Changing permissions for /var/www/html

I've studied this topic https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FilePermissions for a while and can't get it work for some reason. Particularly, these lines interest me the most: To change all the permissions of each file and folder under a specified…
Mark Alexa
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change ownership of all files from root to user

i'm new to Ubuntu and was wondering if there is a way to remove the ownership of all files and scripts from root to user even if i have to re-install Ubuntu? i do know about the command 'chown -v username foldername', although it doesn't work on all…
rgr
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How to change file ownership when chown says "invalid user: ‘–R'"?

ubuntu64@ubuntu:/$ sudo chown –R hduser:hadoop mongodbdata chown: invalid user: ‘–R' When I try to change the ownership of the file, I am just getting invalid user: '-R' error.
Christopher Gaspar
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How to change the owner of a file or folder?

Sometimes I use root account to create some file for normal user. But it is just for convenient. And I really hope the owner of this file should be the user I create this file for. How can I change the file owner? (GUI tools are better)
pah8J
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Root Owns Home Directory, chown does not work

I am running Ubuntu 12.04 and having various problems. I have traced it back to the fact that my user's home directory (/home/user) is owned by root. The /home directory is actually mounted on another drive, but I can see that in fstab I am…
DJElbow
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Undeletable directory in lost+found

How can I delete this directory? I did fsck and it has found some garbage, I looked through these files and there wasn't something important. So I've tried to delete the contents of /lost+found and everything has gone except this strange directory.…
Grief
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3 answers

Does root ownership and exclusive access imply encryption?

If I have a file with permissions and ownership like: -rw------- 1 root root, is this file encrypted? I am asking this because I am wondering how the file is really protected against being read as plain bytes and then reconstructed by some…
Marc Cayuela
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After `chown -R` git is super slow

I have a massive GIT project with several GIT submodules inside. I recursively changed ownership(chown -r) from root to my user for each file in my project. Now any git command takes a lot of time to complete and seems to use 99% CPU. What is the…
lukas.pukenis
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2 answers

Set myself as owner of /etc with chown command now getting all kinds of errors

I needed to edit a .config file (which I know for a fact is not creating these problems, just to clear that up) and it wouldn't let me save it, so I took ownership of /etc and all contents with the command chown -hR username /etc and that let me…
Raf
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What specific bad things happen when gedit is used with sudo?

I read this answer explaining that "sometimes" root can own something at /home/$USER directory. Can anyone give an example how to prove it. Just give a test case when something really bad happens, when I run sudo gedit /etc/rc.local edit file and…
Pilot6
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How can I view what groups a user is in?

What are some different ways to view what groups a user is in?
JEllis23
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2 answers

Can I safely change group ownership of /var/log/auth.log?

I am the Splunk administrator working with an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS system and I want to collect events from /var/log/auth.log. -rw-r----- 1 root adm 16534643 Jan 8 09:49 /var/log/auth.log Splunk runs as a normal user, splunk. $ id…
iAmJeff
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