Only 8 days into Ubuntu, and I did some damage

Question

In order to eliminate some of the permissions obstacles I keep finding, I decided to make it easier on myself. I did

$ sudo chmod 755 -R /usr

If I knew 10 hours ago what I've learned in researching this, I wouldn't have used that command. I tried this first

$ chmod 755 -R /usr

That resulted an a large number of these:

$ chmod: changing permissions of ‘/usr/dir/file’: Operation not permitted

I tried another sudo command, and that one returns:

effective uid is not 0, is sudo installed setuid root?

Is there a way to reverse this without a clean reinstall? All I've done for the last 8 or 9 days is to read, configure software, and try to learn how to use the terminal, and I don't exactly look forward to starting that process again, even if not quite back to the beginning.

Related: How to fix sudo after “chmod -R 777 /usr/bin”? and Ubuntu sudo not working But strugee is right. You should reinstall. Having only used your system for eight days, it's very unlikely that you've customized your system enough for anything besides reinstalling to get you back to what you had, more easily. — Eliah Kagan, Aug 18 '13 at 12:31

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 18 '13 at 09:45

4

Not really. It's technically feasible, but a clean reinstall will be easier to fix this kind of issue.

If you really want to go the hard way, you should boot a live CD and reinstall sudo on your installation. Then reboot and sudo should be working again, allowing you to reinstall all your broken packages, etc.

answered Aug 18 '13 at 09:45

strugee

1,092

3

Plus, anything besides reinstalling runs the risk of not fully fixing the problem, and being unpleasantly surprised when things don't work right later. – Eliah Kagan Aug 18 '13 at 12:32

Only 8 days into Ubuntu, and I did some damage

1 Answers1