Undoing change of ownership to var directory

Question

I accidently ran sudo chown -R user:user *.* (on Ubuntu 11.1) inside /var directory..

Even after running sudo chown -R root:root *.* (and rebooting) I keep getting GUI messages that some operations are not allowed (permission errors) and even trying to run mysql, raises

ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)

Can this be undone?

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 11 '12 at 16:37

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You're going to have a headache fixing that manually. Your best bet is to restore from backup.

answered Feb 11 '12 at 16:37

MDMarra

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 11 '12 at 16:32

0

Not easily. /var isn't owned entirely by root. Individual bits of software own individual directories there. For example, /var/run/mysqld should be owned by the MySQL user. Your best bet is to fix these permissions as you encounter errors.

answered Feb 11 '12 at 16:32

devicenull

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Don't forget the old `/var/spool/mail`, either. ☺ – JdeBP Feb 12 '12 at 13:18
Also make sure that the ownership of `/var/lib/mysql/` is set to `mysql:mysql`. – John R. Aug 13 '21 at 09:45

Undoing change of ownership to var directory

2 Answers2