Permissions Challenge

[kah5683]

Initially trying to delete everything off a 2nd hard drive so I would have enough room for a backup of /home with unison.  There was one file, an mp3 file I ripped from a CD that I could not delete.  Wouldn't let me change permissions and/or said it didn't exist.  I tried also as root.  No luck.  I finally gave up and just deleted partition and reformatted.

Now I am filling up the 2nd hard drive.  I initially just copied everthing over, then ran unison.  I then realized there were props issues, so I did chown and chmod per Texstar:

#own all files in your home folder
[root@localhost ~]# chown -R texstar:texstar /home/texstar

# set the permission on your home folder that prevents others from having read or write access.
[root@localhost ~]# chmod 0700 /home/texstar

This didn't change them all, and didn't give me feedback on errors.

I went in dolphin under properties and permissions, and changed to what I wanted, then marked apply to all subfolders, and continue to get error messages and the process stops.  For example:

Could not change permissions for /home/kevin/.dvdcss/(���r���-9a80c539530ca592-0000000000.

When I try to delete file, says it doesn't exist.  Closed and reopened dolphin, still there, same problem.

So, 4 questions:

1  How do I delete these files
2  How do I make sure all permissions changed with all files
3  should I change permissions for groups and others to forbidden or read only?
4  should I check off changes and deletions only by owner?

Thanks!

[Bald Brick]

Initially trying to delete everything off a 2nd hard drive so I would have enough room for a backup of /home with unison.  There was one file, an mp3 file I ripped from a CD that I could not delete.  Wouldn't let me change permissions and/or said it didn't exist.  I tried also as root.  No luck.  I finally gave up and just deleted partition and reformatted.

Now I am filling up the 2nd hard drive.  I initially just copied everthing over, then ran unison.  I then realized there were props issues, so I did chown and chmod per Texstar:

#own all files in your home folder
[root@localhost ~]# chown -R texstar:texstar /home/texstar

# set the permission on your home folder that prevents others from having read or write access.
[root@localhost ~]# chmod 0700 /home/texstar

This didn't change them all, and didn't give me feedback on errors.

I went in dolphin under properties and permissions, and changed to what I wanted, then marked apply to all subfolders, and continue to get error messages and the process stops.  For example:

Could not change permissions for /home/kevin/.dvdcss/(���r���-9a80c539530ca592-0000000000.

When I try to delete file, says it doesn't exist.  Closed and reopened dolphin, still there, same problem.

So, 4 questions:

1  How do I delete these files

If the problem is characters that your system can't read, run the rm command and replace those characters with wildcards. If you have a file "test���.txt", try

Code:

rm test???.txt

But if you have a file called for instance "testing.txt" in the same folder and if you don't want to delete that one too, then you have to move it or back it up first.

[Bald Brick]

2  How do I make sure all permissions changed with all files

The command

Code:

ls -la

will list all files in a directory including their permissions and ownership details

Code:

ls -laR

lists all files in all subdirectories too, but to be of any practical use the output will usually have to be written to a file:

Code:

ls -laR >testlist.text

Even then you will probably get more output than you bargained for.


But you could of course simply set Dolphin or Konqueror to show owner, group and permissions.

[Bald Brick]

3  should I change permissions for groups and others to forbidden or read only?
4  should I check off changes and deletions only by owner?

That depends on a) how paranoid you are and b) how many user you have. (The root user's home directory /root should obviously not be accessible to anybody but root, let alone editable by any other user. And ordinary users should ordinarily not be able to change files in folders owned by root.)

[Leiche]

or you can use mc, to delete your files...