I won't be the first and I won't be the last, I suppose. While playing around with the find command, I made a whoops and it would appear that instead of changing the permissions of the ~/web directory to 750, it changed the permissions of the entire filesystem (/) to 750, however I'm not certain, but any attempt to investigate is thwarted by Permission denied messages. For everything. This was the offending command: sudo find ~/web . type d -exec chmod 750 {} If I'm not mistaken, the Ubuntu team disabled root logins as a safety precaution so I'm out of ideas. I'm (obviously) a total newbie when it comes to file permissions so I was wondering if anyone had some good or even some bad advice to share. I've mentally prepped myself to losing everything on the computer which is only of mild consequence, since I have backups, but I did do a bit of work on this box over the week and it would be a shame to lose it all due to a boneheaded mistake. If you are reading this message, ask yourself, have you backed up any of your work recently? Thanks in advance for any insights. Feel free to scold me for using sudo carelessly