chown username:username .Xauthority

Question

I'm stuck in a login loop Ubuntu 17.04. When I go to tty1 and type chown username:roey .Xauthority taken from Ubuntu gets stuck in a login loop

It says that my user doesn't exist.

What is the problem? How can I log back in to Ubuntu-Gnome?

rm .Xauthority and allow it to get recreated – Joshua May 19 '17 at 20:23 — Joshua, May 19 '17 at 20:23

Rinzwind · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-19T15:46:27.893

12

The command is

sudo chown roey:roey .Xauthority

1st roey is the user, 2nd is the group roey

edited May 19 '17 at 15:46

answered May 19 '17 at 14:36

Rinzwind

5

+1, but you will need sudo if it's not yours already and btw the second roey is superfluous as just adding the colon after the first one changes the group as well – Zanna May 19 '17 at 15:17
1

to finish this press ALT+-> several times (in my case it's 6 tty's so 6 times) until you get into the Ubuntu-Gnome login screen and login. – Roey May 19 '17 at 16:51
2

@Roey Also CTRL+ALT+F7 – cat May 19 '17 at 18:13
That didn't fix my problem, sadly. – Rafael_Espericueta Sep 10 '17 at 02:27
1

@rafael but did you also get the same error notice? Have a look at the .xsessions_errors file in your home – Rinzwind Sep 11 '17 at 06:46

Ravexina · Answer 2 · 2017-05-19T20:46:26.620

9

If you don't know what username/group you shoud use, I suggest using something like this:

sudo chown $USER:`id -gn` .Xauthority

edited May 19 '17 at 20:46

answered May 19 '17 at 15:53

Ravexina

1

Are you sure you don't mean $USER:\id -gn`` (note the colon character in the middle)? Also, that would be equivalent to just $USER: since chown uses the primary group of the specified user if you omit the group name. – David Foerster May 19 '17 at 20:15
@DavidFoerster Both : and . will work fine, didn't know about omitting group like $USER:, good point +1 :-) – Ravexina May 19 '17 at 20:25
check info coreutils and the section which is about chown. I'll change it to : in case of username contains dot. – Ravexina May 19 '17 at 20:44
1

Indeed: “New scripts should avoid the use of `.' because it is not portable […].” Looks like we both learned something today. :-] – David Foerster May 19 '17 at 20:47
Yeah, I just used it to show an alternative approach and it caused us to learn something new :) – Ravexina May 19 '17 at 20:48

2 Answers2