my whole home folder is "owned" by root

[spadhawk]

ok what happened was I had another installation but it was masses up so i decided to reinstall i went with the live cd and made a "tar.gz" archive of my home folder and put it on flash media but i did it with sudo. so when i reinstalled i went to copy it to the home and it didn't copy so i used sudo to copy it then it sorta didn't work i had to change the file permissions the folder to me. and then it would let me log in but like 90% of it is still owned my root so programs cant use. how can i change the permissions of all m files in the home folder to me.

[boblemur]

you could do


sudo chown -R <your name> /home/<your name>

should do it

[DGortze380]

permissions and ownership are two different (though connected) things.

sudo chown -R username /home/username
to change owner

sudo chmod 700 /home/username
to change permission for owner to read/write/execute and no access for anyone else other than root

[Dr Small]

Try:

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /home/$USER

[boblemur]

when using cp you should keep in mind that cp dosent keep things like time stamps ownership or permissions unless you tell it to... use -a to keep them (i think its -a could be wrong)

[spadhawk]

sudo chmod 700 /home/username
to change permission for owner to read/write/execute and no access for anyone else other than root

i think that cammand worked

[aysiu]

What's done is done, but I would have advised to do the chown but not the chmod. Not everything in your home directory is supposed to have the same permissions.

[DGortze380]

What's done is done, but I would have advised to do the chown but not the chmod. Not everything in your home directory is supposed to have the same permissions.

Didn't tell him to chmod everything. Actually, the first command I gave him was to chown. I explained both commands. permissions can always be changed as needed if he runs into problems.

[aysiu]

Didn't tell him to chmod everything. Actually, the first command I gave him was to chown. I explained both commands. permissions can always be changed as needed if he runs into problems.

In post #3, you said

sudo chmod 700 /home/username
to change permission for owner to read/write/execute and no access for anyone else other than root

And I'm saying that can break your installation, as not everything in your home directory is supposed to have the same permissions set.