Comments on: How to: Linux reset the permissions of the installed rpm packages with –setperms option

By: Kevin Andrews

Kevin Andrews — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 22:02:53 +0000

Thanks for taking the time to put this solution together… I was on my CentOS VPS changing permissions to secure down a drupal install and forgot for a moment that “/” meant the root of the server not the directory i was cd’d to… I accidently started chmoding the entire server to 777 :-( not good..

SSH stopped working so i went onto the VPS web-based serial console and ran your commands… everything including ssh started working again!

Nearing the end of 2011 and yet again you’ve saved a server :) thanks very much!

By: Tux Amit

Tux Amit — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 10:36:52 +0000

Gr8 work !!

Could you pls let us know.. how the rpm command gets installed rpm’s files default permission details .. there must some rpm db which will having permission details ..

By: Paul Reiber

Paul Reiber — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 19:38:57 +0000

…let’s change that to _definitely_ rather than “may”.

You DEFINITELY want to flip the order in which you run these.

Permissions corrections enacted by –setperms will get blown away by subsequent u/g corrections enacted by –setugids.

Getting the order correct, and combining this into a one-liner, we have:

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

By: marc

marc — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 20:44:49 +0000

for p in $(rpm -qa); do rpm –setugids $p; done
saves my ass !
after a wrong “chmod 440 /” i was’nt able to ssh to the machine just root login works
this fix’d it.

By: Bryan Sutherland

Bryan Sutherland — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 23:32:58 +0000

Thanks for this article Vivek :D :D
As noted above, this saved me tonnes of time and a rebuild that I really didn’t want to take on today :P

By: Pedro Sousa

Pedro Sousa — Tue, 10 May 2011 09:23:52 +0000

Almost middle of 2011 and your effort is still saving servers.

Thank you Vivek.

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 11:14:32 +0000

Thank you so much, your post has saved my server!

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 04:06:26 +0000

Thanks very much for this! Saved me a lot of time and effort!

By: Semi

Semi — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 05:30:05 +0000

I prefer “rpm –setperms -a” to restore permissions of ALL packaged files.

By: James

James — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:45:04 +0000

You may want to flip the order in which you change mod and u/gid since setting a mode like 2755 will be undone if you change the u/gid.

Run

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

before

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

By: Magnus

Magnus — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:13:11 +0000

Thank you for publishing this information you saved me a bounch of hours of work :)

Thanks

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:29:18 +0000

A HUGE thank you for saving me hours of time.

Just finished installing a Centos 5.1 server, and stupidly executed a CHMOD -R 770 * in the / directory.

You’d be amazed at how many things that will break! (well, I was).

This article saved me doing a rebuild. THANK YOU!!

-Adam

By: Imran M Yousuf

Imran M Yousuf — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 10:44:58 +0000

Thanks for the tips. Will rpm –setperms`rpm -qa` work as well?

By: vivek

vivek — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 17:48:14 +0000

@raj and Miguel,

Thanks for sharing your tips :)

By: Miguel Rozsas

Miguel Rozsas — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 17:17:05 +0000

I would like to add another usefull related rpm option: Verify. The verify rpm option could tell you what file was changed since it was installed. For instance, rpm -qV openssh tells you what and how the files from openssh package are different from the original installation:


root@bigslam:~>rpm -qV openssh
S.5....T  c /etc/ssh/ssh_config
S.5....T  c /etc/ssh/sshd_config
root@bigslam:~>

In this case, the c indicates a configuration file. The S indicates the size differs, the

5 indicates a MD5SUM differs, and the T indicates the mTime differs. Other characters, MDLUG, could indicates the Mode differs, the Device major/minor differs, a Link differs, and the User and/or Group differs.



By: raj
raj — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 10:13:07 +0000
nice tip. Here is how I verified by changing tar packag perms to raj:raj and again restored back the same:
f=`rpm -ql tar`
for p in $f; do chmod raj:raj $p; done
for p in $f; do ll $p; done
for p in `rpm -qa`; do rpm --setugids $p; done
“ are back-ticks not single quotes (look under the tidle (~) character.)
babai!