Made a big mistake with chown

**ineuw** · September 9th, 2013

Mistakenly executed

Code:

sudo chown -R ineuw:ineuw /

forgetting to add the application name for deletion, and changed ownership to a LOT of OS files which shouldn't be changed, before I realized and hit Ctrl-Break. Is there a way to reverse my error?

**lah7** · September 9th, 2013

From my experience, it's pretty hard to completely reverse such changes, just like if you was to accidentally execute a dangerous command on / instead of ./

Most important OS files are owned by root, so I would suggest changing them back as root being the owner.

However, I can't 100% certain about this. It's really risky and might misbehave the system due to permissions issues, since not all the files are owned by root, for example, a web server like Apache2 would need www-data as its owner.

**ajgreeny** · September 9th, 2013

You may like to try

Code:

sudo chown -R root:root /
sudo chown -R ineuw:ineuw /home/ineuw

This will firstly return the root file system, including your home, to root ownership and then return your home to your own ownership though I admit I am not totally sure about its likely success, and may cause problems with ownership of some files in root which have other owners.

**scbingham** · September 9th, 2013

Unfortunately your chances of correcting your mistake are incredibly slim. Any changes/updates you make in the future may have issues & you'll never know if it's a config or ownership problem.

Your best bet is a clean install. Save your /home & any other important data first.