Imscaredofgrass

i was wondering how you can set the permissions to 777 for everything under / - including folders, files, and even mounted harddisk, without going through each individual folder?

smolloy

Why would you want to do this??

I guess if you wanted you could useBut it really doesn't sound like a good idea.

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anomie

I would suggest not doing that.

ihayhurst

Like smalloy said why?, even the last OS on your distro list isnt quite that wide open... Was it just a way to get someone to answer or a genuine desire to achieve a particular effect ?

the -R option in the code posted is Recursive, it drills down through the dir's below the given starting point...
A recurring sysadmin's nightmare is that oneday a clever string of quoting and xargs etc will make recursive function like that match the dir '..' and your rm will 'escape' and wipe out your system (and career) makes me sweat just to think about it



shudders

Cheers
Ian

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Slip

The permissions are there for a reason, if you set everything to 777 every user on the box will be capable of destroying your whole system. This is a major security risk, I strongly suggest you do not do this.

smolloy

The experts can correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the benefits of linux is that stuff d/loaded from the net (inc. viruses) are not executable. If you regularly run a script that makes everything executable, this will include any nasty wee pieces of code that you may inadvertantly have d/loaded.
For someone moving from windows it may seem like a pain to have to use su just to use certain commands, or to access certain files, but when you realise all the benefits of doing it like this it gives you a warm cosy feeling to know how safe your computer is.

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bigtomrodney

Things in /proc /sys and /dev have their permissions changed systematically all the time, and there is no reason to change them anyway. If you really must do it, maybe consider something less severe like It is asking for trouble though.

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twhiting9275

Setting global permissions like this is bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.
Not only is it insecure, but it will break quite a few things, such as perl scripts,
php (if compiled with suexec mode on), and numerous other things.

Permissions are setup by the distro @ default, and should be left as they are, unless they're too lenient, and then they should be changed on a case by case, file by file basis, never on a global basis.

Imscaredofgrass

thanks everybody

i only have one user anyways, and it gets annyoing when i try to install something and it cant overwrite a file.

twhiting9275

You'll still have that kind of a problem, with installing rpm based stuff. This is why you use the sudo command effectively.

I know it's annoying, but lousy permissions will cause lots of problems. Even if it's only a one user system, if it's setup with an internet connection, it can still be very hazardous to your health to do this