Saturday, July 11, 2009

Fallout

Recently I blogged about my misadventures with a full partition that contained my $HOME folder. I noticed not long after that episode that I still had some strange behavior, such as various program preferences not being saved and issues copying some files during a data backup.

After doing a bit of sleuthing, I concluded that in addition to the issues I wrote about at the time, my $HOME permissions had been altered. I did a bit of digging and from a few different forum threads, I plucked out a few commands that helped me to restore things back to their normal order. What I had to run was the following:

sudo umount ~/.gvfs --> unmount the GNOME Virtual File System config so that I can...

rm -r ~/.gvfs -->
...delete it, to allow...

sudo chown -R rick /home/rick -->
...everything to properly be chown-ed by me.

And finally:

chmod 755 ~ -->
Set proper permissions for ~ (Read/Write/Execute for me, Read/Execute for everyone else).


Yes, some of these things can be done through Nautilus, but that method is not recommended. The reason being that Nautilus does not always handle permissions as gracefully as the trusty command line.

So there you have it, a two-part post on what how to remedy a broken system. Again, the upshot is not to let this happen to begin with!

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