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?