Recovering from bad ownership
- by Christian Sciberras
I was going to change the ownership of a directory to apache:apache, but I ended up running:
chown -R apache:apache /
Bad! Very bad! I knew what was going on when it started saying:
chown: changing ownership of `/proc/2694/fd/48': Permission denied
That's when I stopped everything (Ctrl+C).
The current system I have is a server running virtualbox running CentOS 5. This problem happened inside the VM.
Currently, everything seems to be working, but I have not restarted the system yet, and to be honest, I'm afraid that if I did something will break.
I do not know chown's order, should I be concerned and assume something will break after a reboot? Is there a way to recover form this problem without having to rely on backups? I do have a daily one, but I thought there may be a simpler way out.