Subject: Re: bug#16104: Desktop Linux Mint 15 Olivia is broken due to chmod permission changes
From: Bernhard Voelker <[email-masked]>
To: Denise <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:42:06 +0100
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

tag 16104 notabug
thanks

On 12/10/2013 10:47 PM, Denise wrote:
> sudo chmod -R u-x,g-x,o-rwx usr/share/

outch.

Thanks for the bug report, however, as you might already know,
this is not a bug in coreutils' chmod but rather an issue in
the way you used it.  Therefore, I'm marking this bug as done.

Okay, back to your case. To get your system back to work, you
should understand what the above command did. Read about it.

To restore the permissions, your best bet would be a backup.
With this, you could go there and run a command line like the
following to change the permission back to what they have been
in that backup.

  $ cd /backup/usr/share
  $ find . -exec chmod -v --reference="{}" "/usr/share/{}" \;

But again, please first read the documentation of the involved
programs to understand what happened and what you are doing,
at least:

  $ info coreutils 'chmod invocation'

Have a nice day,
Berny