Due to an intermittent internet connecton and some fat fingered typing, I came very close to sending the command chown -R me.group / to my server, which I think would be fairly disruptive.
Is there a way to backup just the permissions on all the files on the system?
To back up all permissions on the system:
getfacl -R / > acl_backup
To restore:
setfacl --restore=acl_backup
Of course, check out the manpages but it's a pretty straight forward command that many people are unaware of:
man getfacl
man setfacl
You can run ls -lR / > permissions_backup to create a file containing all permissions, but this would be quite hard to restore. You could of course quickly write a script to do it.
There's no specific command to back up file permissions. As the previous poster mentions, you could craft a recursive find or ls -lR to a file, and then compare that file with the permissions on any particular file you're interested in.
Alternatively, there are packages for intrusion detection which monitor file sizes and permissions that this is probably overkill for your scenario.
Tid.
If you use a Linux distribution what uses packages (basically anything except Slackware), the permissions are probably stored in the RPM/Deb/whatever database. For RPMs, check out the --setperms and --setugids options.