Restoring original Solaris file permissions
Have you ever been in a situation where you have recursively changed the file permissions in a directory then realised you were in the wrong location?
For example (chown -R myuser /spacesomedir
), realising there is a space between the / and somedir .... This action is catastrofic as we have just changed the ownership of all files under / (root) downwards.
Don't panic ... All is not lost ... We don't need to reinstall the system as Solaris maintains a database of all packages installed on the system.
In a nutshell, for every file and directory installed by any package on a Solaris system an entry is written into the Solaris Software repository (aka /var/sadm/install/contents)
Each entry contains all the information on a file, including it's path, owner, permissions. Using this information can be used to restore permissions and ownership which have accidentally changed
Here is a short step-by-step on how to restore the file permissions:
Note: The pkgchk
utility does not restore setuid, setgid or sticky bits, you must set these manually (where appropriate)
- Boot the system into single-user mode from alternative media (net, cdrom, etc.):
ok boot net -s
- Mount the affected file systems under the /a mountpoint (for example):
# mount / /a # mount /usr /a/usr # mount /var /a/var # mount /opt /a/opt
- Run the
pkgchk
command with the-R
option to specify an alternative root path, and the-f
flag to say that file permissions need to be fixed:# pkgchk -R /a -f
References:
- Solaris 8 Systems Administration Guide
- Sun blueprints The Solaris Software Registry