# I accidentally screwed up permission on /



## johl (Feb 15, 2017)

As someone may know...sometimes we screwed up and make a mess...i accidentally run a command that messed up all permissions and others on root "/".
Me goal was to run command to change permissions in local maps and got the root integrated in command...that f***ed up the box 
`print / -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 0640`
Is there a way to recreate default permissions and others?
Now the box can't boot...
Please help and thanks in advance for support.

Best Jonas


----------



## SirDice (Feb 15, 2017)

No guarantee this actually works, it may screw up things even worse:

```
mtree -p / -e -u -f /etc/mtree/BSD.root.dist
mtree -p /usr -e -u -f /etc/mtree/BSD.usr.dist
mtree -p /var -e -u -f /etc/mtree/BSD.var.dist
```

After this you may still need to fix the permissions of the home folders in /usr/home/ but it should get you going again.


----------



## johl (Feb 25, 2017)

Thanks SirDice for helpful suggestions.
I went that way, after a detour. I made a boot-USB from Nas4Free (yeah, thats FreeBSD) and booted up my box with all disks disconnected. NAS4Free run a live OS from USB. I connected my problem disk and mounted that to the live-running NAS4Free. Then i ran `chmod -R 0755 /mnt/OLD_DISK/`. I guessed that i would have a lot of problems with users/groupids and such, so i ran `chmod 4755 /mnt/OLD_DISK/usr/bin/su`. I check the /etc/mtree/BSD.var.dist and manually set some of the permissions. Now i will let 0755 be on the whole install for a while. The bos isn't on Internet, its on my private network. Then i rebooted the box with my old disk. Now i can boot and everything looks ok. I let this run for a while before i will do a reinstall. Probably more to follow...
Best Jonas


----------

