16.04 - How To Grant Read Write Access To Folder / File after Messing Up
It's not read/write permission causing your problem - directories need x
permission to be accessed. That one should have mode 755
, not 666
sudo chmod 755 /usr/share/themes
Check it looks like this:
$ ls -ld /usr/share/themes
drwxr-xr-x 43 root root 4096 Apr 20 23:13 /usr/share/themes
Check the permissions on the theme directories inside - they need to have 755
permissions as well
When you really need to add something to a system (root owned) directory, don't touch the file permissions at all - just use sudo
to get elevated permissions for one command, for example:
sudo cp my_file /path/to/system/directory
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Comments
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Kayote over 1 year
Folder :
/usr/share/themes
I was trying to beautify my desktop so downloaded some themes. Found out that I don't have permission to paste the theme files to the above folder. So I used the guide here: Give user write access to folder
This has messed up the system theme & now the folder is inaccessible and the system has a white theme (which I presume means no theme). Running
stat themes
gives :xx@TPX260:/usr/share$ stat themes File: 'themes' Size: 4096 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 4096 directory Device: 801h/2049d Inode: 2228383 Links: 17 Access: (0666/drw-rw-rw-) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root) Access: 2016-10-18 09:38:10.786996316 +0100 Modify: 2016-10-18 09:33:18.320935727 +0100 Change: 2016-10-18 09:35:18.308242550 +0100 Birth: -
How can I get permissions of the directory back to the OS default so that themes can start working again?
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Kayote over 7 yearsThankyou @Zanna. While the folder access has become
0755/drwxr-xr-x
, however, the system is still not able to pickup the theme files & they are appearing in 'dark-green' color. -
Kayote over 7 yearsJust noticed, the individual theme files within the folder still have permissions of
0666/drw-rw-rw-
... -
Zanna over 7 years@Kayote ah I see you need to chmod 755 all the theme directories too