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

1934856Apr 1 2020 — edited Apr 8 2020

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?

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Added on Apr 1 2020
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