File and folder permissions

Support & Help Requests
1

Is there a quick and dirty way to open (lift, relax, not sure what the right word is) the file and subfolder permissions of the home folder?

I’m reinstalling from scratch. Everything has come back safely from back up, but for some reason I’m looking at a sea of padlock icons.

I know I could always just open Caja as superuser, but that is bad practice.

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2

Hello Coinneach,

Changing the permissions of the restored files would be easy enough to do. But before we do that may I ask a couple of questions?

  1. The files you restored, are they just documents, music, pictures, videos, etc. Or did you completely restore your entire home folder including the hidden files and folders?

  2. Who currently owns the restored files with the padlock icons on them, root or a user from your last installation?

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3

Hi Steven,

Many thanks for your reply.

I have been searching on-line and have found a couple of methods which
might work, although I haven’t tried them yet.

However, to answer your questions:

  1. The answer is somewhere in between. I restored all my documents,
    music, pictures and videos PLUS the “.thunderbird” (hidden) folder.
  2. The files and the folders with the padlocks are now owned by “root”
    where they used to belong to me in the last installation. There are
    no other users on this box.

Thanks for your interest.

Ken

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4

It’s possible that sudo was used in copying the files. That would result in the files being owned by root even within your home folder. Change the owner of your home folders and files back to your user name from the terminal with:

If your user name is jane

sudo chown -R jane:jane /home/jane

Permissions should not need changing.

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5

@Spyder has given you the correct solution, and the same as I was going to recommend. My only concern was what exactly you restored, and who owned them. But according to your response, sudo chown -R jane:jane /home/jane should work nicely.

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6

Sorry for the delay in replying. I wanted to do a full back up before giving this a go. It worked perfectly though.

Many, many thanks.

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