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Restore permissions on Red Hat

Introduction

A colleague of mine made a serious mistake (running chown -Rf mysql on /!). This caused a huge mess, and we had to find a solution to restore the correct permissions.

Fortunately, Red Hat anticipated these kinds of errors and included the --setperms and --setugids options in the rpm command to repair permissions on installed packages. Basically, this gives you a way to repair your machine.

So if you also made a mistake like this, know that there is a solution on Red Hat.

Usage

Here are the two magic commands:

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for u in $(rpm -qa); do rpm --setugids $u; done
for p in $(rpm -qa); do rpm --setperms $p; done

You'll need to do a bit of verification afterward because this only repairs the permissions of files and directories contained in installed packages. Your personal files will not have their permissions restored with this method.

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