4 Replies Latest reply on Apr 8, 2020 11:20 AM by 1934856

and beyond

1934856 Apr 8, 2020 8:54 PM

Is anyone able to help me work out what this command has actually done?

It appears to have recursively changed the root filesystem and a lot of application directories to owner 755?

I'm thinking the : has been interpreted, but I can't find anything online to suggest this or what it has caused the command to do?

Update:

On further investigation, the simple # chmod -R 755 /test/picture command did the same thing!!

The files to be changed are in an NFS mounted Linux filesystem, so it's possible the mount options may have played a part. I still don't see how these commands would 'escape' the current filesystem when there are no links to /.

I would have expected the first command to fail with and 'error' file not found?

1. Re: chown -R 755 test:60 /test/picture (executed as root) overwrote permissions in / and beyond

Jens Apr 1, 2020 8:53 PM (in response to 1934856)

Dangerous day for answering to such a question ;-)
You mixed up change-ownership with change mode. Don't know a thing about your environment but 'test:60' should typically just yield you a file not found unless it is present and a symlink to /. You might want to check your command history to see whether that was actually the command line which went through the filesystem or just some attempt you remember.
pkgchk might be handy to identify other changes.
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2. Re: chown -R 755 test:60 /test/picture (executed as root) overwrote permissions in / and beyond

1934856 Apr 2, 2020 2:25 PM (in response to Jens)

Yes, it was a mixed up command. I would have expected to get a file not found on "test:60". I did not expect the command to recursively change the ownerships throughout the entire system.

There was also a simple # chmod -R 755 /test/picture command that did the same thing!!
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3. Re: chown -R 755 test:60 /test/picture (executed as root) overwrote permissions in / and beyond

Jens Apr 3, 2020 1:44 PM (in response to 1934856)

I'd check, whether there is an upward pointing symlink below /test/picture, e.g. find /test/picture -type l
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4. Re: chown -R 755 test:60 /test/picture (executed as root) overwrote permissions in / and beyond

1934856 Apr 7, 2020 6:05 PM (in response to Jens)

We had to recover the server, but I will check that...
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5. Re: chown -R 755 test:60 /test/picture (executed as root) overwrote permissions in / and beyondrther inv

1934856 Apr 8, 2020 11:20 AM (in response to 1934856)

There are no symbolic links found . I also forgot to mention this is an NFS mounted filesystem.
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