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So I am using Transmit.app for my SFTP client and I changed permissions in /home/ and pressed the "Apply to Enclosed..." option as well. So essentially it is applying the desired permission to every single thing in /home/. The size of the directory is a couple gigabytes. Probably 2 or 3. This has been taking like 15 minutes so far. Do you know how long it takes on average? Also, if I need to go or something - is it a bad idea to stop it midway through?

wombats
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    A better question might be _why_ you're modifying the permissions recursively over the entire /home/ hierarchy. I suspect you're going to end up with something you really don't want. What were you attempting to accomplish (aside from trashing permissions on the entire /home/ hierarchy)? – Evan Anderson Jan 06 '12 at 20:42
  • @Evan Such as? Should I cancel right now? – wombats Jan 06 '12 at 20:43
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    You can cancel it if you'd like. Odds are you've already changed a bunch of permissions anyway. It might give you less to clean up if you stop it now. What were you trying to actually accomplish? – Evan Anderson Jan 06 '12 at 20:45
  • Permission issues. I have a user who needs to be able to edit all of those directories and it is constantly annoying so I 775'd it. – wombats Jan 06 '12 at 20:51
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    ...one user editing every home directory? O_o – Bart Silverstrim Jan 06 '12 at 20:53
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    @wombats Soooo, everyone is able to read and execute anything in anyone else's home directory? Yeah, that seems like a terrible idea. – MDMarra Jan 06 '12 at 20:56
  • There are only two of us. – wombats Jan 06 '12 at 20:57
  • @wombats Plus *all* of the service and system accounts on the box. Now any one of them has access to everything in home if compromised. – MDMarra Jan 06 '12 at 20:58
  • Well, that narrows down who you think was being annoying. – Bart Silverstrim Jan 06 '12 at 20:58
  • ...if there's just two of you, that would imply just two home dirs, which implies you want him to edit your home directory files...why...not...separate your workstations or virtualize them?... – Bart Silverstrim Jan 06 '12 at 20:59
  • Or are you trying to get to a shared folder? – Bart Silverstrim Jan 06 '12 at 21:02
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    I don't know. The other user is my pet wombat so his Unix skills are sub par... – wombats Jan 06 '12 at 21:45

2 Answers2

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You're modifying inodes and not files, it should be fairly quick. Last time I did that it took under a minute on our old LTSP boxen. You've made a bunches of changes already if it worked at all.

But it's generally a bad idea to do such indiscriminate changes.

Update based on the comments: @wombats You need to set up another directory on the box, set up a group for it, set the group permissions for the directory with a chmod -R 2770 /shared/foo and chown -R .groupname /shared/foo, and then reset your /home directory to its original value.

And ask your local sysadmin for her forgiveness for doing such a heinous thing.

I also recommend reading my answer to a related question: https://serverfault.com/a/329890/73435

Community
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Magellan
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O_o what were you doing this for?

I'm hoping you're the only person on this machine. At any rate, there's no way to answer this, because it depends on the size of your /home directory. It can take minutes. It can take days. Depends on users and number of files and the disk subsystem speed, drive speed, system load...etc...

At any rate...it's usually a rather bad idea to recursively change the /home folder.

Is it bad to stop midway through? Well...it depends, I suppose. It could mean less to fix later. If you're the only user on the machine, I suppose it doesn't matter all that much. It might lead to some interesting errors down the road, but you might have them just from playing with recursive permissions like this...

Bart Silverstrim
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