[SOLVED] Did something stupid, not sure how to fix it

[curiousgirl]

I fixed it

For the benefit of anyone as stupid as me I will describe what happened.

I was trying out the usermod command but my book did not include the option -m.
So I did usermod -l newusername oldusername then usermod -d /home/newusername
Then I tried to log in. Since /home/newusername did not exist the computer became confused, threw up some errors and my user entered the environment of / instead of /home.

I did ls to see what was there and realised my mistake so then I did mv /home/oldusername /home/newusername. I also tried a few other things I suspect were red herrings.

Still the same thing happened. I ls /home and find out that although it says /home/newusername is there when I try and ls /home/newusername it says the file or directory doesn't exist. Frustrated with the whole process I change everything back. Back to old username, back to old home. Once I have done that I finally am not in the / environment when I log in but I can hardly do anything and I always get an error "could not update ICEauthority file /home/Sophia/.ICEauthority.

Try a few things, mostly red herrings. Finally what fixes it is chmod 0500 -v -R u+w /home/Sophia. I guess somewhere in the process it must have undone write permission, although I don't know which specific step would've done that.

[Lazydog]

I have had the following isue with ICEauthority. after I logged in as normal user Level3 I su'ed to root so I could run some update software. After the update was complete I forgot to log out as root and started the GUI. This in turn made the ICEauthority file owned by root so next time I logged in and started X it would complain that it could not update this file and quit/fail to start. simple fix was op make my user owner of he file and everything was fixed. Still do this every now and then as I don't use root often.

[curiousgirl]

I have had the following isue with ICEauthority. after I logged in as normal user Level3 I su'ed to root so I could run some update software. After the update was complete I forgot to log out as root and started the GUI. This in turn made the ICEauthority file owned by root so next time I logged in and started X it would complain that it could not update this file and quit/fail to start. simple fix was op make my user owner of he file and everything was fixed. Still do this every now and then as I don't use root often.

Yeah this is basically what happened. Except somehow it changed the permissions as well.