/home default owner and permssions ?

nolan

I changed the owner and permissions by accident lol, can some one tell me what are those to revert my changes?
I'm on my desktop but unable to start any new program, so only tty is accessible at the time.
Send help! 🤦

nolan

All right, investigating, the default permissions for the directory /home are rwxr-xr-x, the numeric equivalent would be 755. The issue was that mine had rwxr-x-x making me unable to launch new programs, not even gnome-terminal, though i was able use tty, but without access to /home/user and interestingly defaulted to /.
What i did was chmod 755 /home , now I'm able to launch gnome-terminal by selecting the icon in budgie.
Seems to be solved, updates will be posted later.

brent

nolan All right, investigating, the default permissions for the directory /home are rwxr-xr-x, the numeric equivalent would be 755. The issue was that mine had rwxr-x-x making me unable to launch new programs, not even gnome-terminal, though i was able use tty, but without access to /home/user and interestingly defaulted to /.
What i did was chmod 755 /home , now I'm able to launch gnome-terminal by selecting the icon in budgie.
Seems to be solved, updates will be posted later.

the crappiest part of your investigation was probably finding a permissions glossary, cross-referencing all the r's and x's and dashes (" The issue was that mine had rwxr-x-x making me unable to launch new programs") then learning what each mystery combination permitted or restricted. I have a headache typing this but that's how it would go for a me solve 🙂.
....on the funny side I spit lager when you said "rwxr-xr-x, the numeric equivalent would be 755" as alphanumeric math and code never quit connect to my noggin...hey Nolan, congrats to you for finding a way to undo a hole of your own making. My track record is not bad in that dept either. Glad for you--what a relief.

nolan

brent investigation

kind of lame though, I asked chat gpt 😆, search for references in other sources and checked an old linux mint install to confirm. I was working with other directory with the same name as /home. Just a typo and I my system could be almost gone, luckily I didn't reboot or shut down my pc.

brent what a relief

for sure!

penny-farthing

Unless I am mistaken, a Linux distribution like Ubuntu has opted for chmod 750 /home.

On a PC with several user accounts, this has the effect of partitioning each of them, in other words, one user cannot access the folders of the others.

nolan

is that what solus use?
seems to be the correct answer, where can I confirm that?

Harvey

nolan

/home is 755 on Solus.
Keep in mind that the /home/ directory is supposed to be owned by root and contains subdirectories owned by individual user(s) on that system. So you wouldn't want /home set to 750, there is no way this is what Ubuntu are doing.

Your individual users home directories within /home such as /home/harvey/ have default permission on Solus of 751.

Octal permissions:
4 = read
2 = write
1 = execute

So /home/harvey being 751 by default on Solus translates to:
OWNER = 7 = read, write, execute | GROUP = 5 = read, execute | OTHER = 1 = execute.

We tried 750 but this prevents users from creating samba shares within their home directory. Plasma would prompt users about the necessary change but Gnome and maybe others did not so the decision was made to set 751 for users home directories. There is no reason for /home to be less than 755.

EDIT:
Tested Ubuntu to confirm:

penny-farthing

Harvey

Thank you @Harvey for these clarifications.

Your screenshot confirms that Ubuntu configure the folder /home in 755 and that of users folders /home/$USER in 750 since version 21.04 as explained the link below:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/604489/what-are-the-default-permissions-of-directories-in-home-desktop-downloads-etc

So, if the choice of Solus is to configure users folders with permission 751 and if it's not the case in our system, it will then be necessary to type the following command terminal:
chmod 751 /home/$USER
that's right ?
Unless we have to do it for each user folder?

Harvey

penny-farthing So, if the choice of Solus is to configure users folders with permission 751 and if it's not the case in our system, it will then be necessary to type the following command terminal:
chmod 751 /home/$USER

Users accounts created a long time ago may have different home directory permissions. In these cases it would require manual user intervention to change these permissions to 751 for every /home/$USER

Personally I do not like 751 and as I don't ever want samba shares in my home directory, I use 750. That said if you use a non default permission and something breaks, that is your problem to deal with.

Ultimately users really should not be playing around with permissions. If you do not know exactly what it is you are doing or even make a tiny mistake you can very easily cause significant breakages or introduce security issues that are not immediately apparent.

penny-farthing

Harvey

All in all, it's there a wise recommendation.

nolan

or block yourself from the system, just like me 😅 lol

nolan

probably don't use chown and chmod if you don't know how to use it otherwise triple check what you are doing.