read only files in Ubuntu

Question

Something has gone weird with Ubuntu 8.4 on my computer. Somehow, many files, docs and audio have decided to become "read only". Other files (that I own) are denying permission to view, move copy or otherwise access.

Does anyone know how this could suddenly happen?

Does anyone have a suggestion as to how to return these files to their original status?

Solution 1

Sounds to me like a permissions issue. Open terminal and cd to one of the folders/files affected.

sudo chown -R user:group ./folder

sudo chmod -R 755 ./folder

• More info on setting permissions: chmod
• More information on setting ownership: chown

Solution 2

Check for commonalities in the file locations. Are they all on the same partition? Only in a few subdirectories?

• If all affected files are under one (or a small number of) directory(ies), it may be a permissions problem. ricbax's answer gives details to fix the issue, but use ls -l to verify that's the problem first.

• Ubuntu and other linuxes are often configured to remount the system partition as read-only when errors are detected. If this is the case, chown and chmod won't help -- you'll need to fix the filesystem (eg with fsck) before you'll be able to remount the partition normally. Any partition could potentially be mounted with this option.

Comments

[ElPoney]

of course "user" and "group" must be your actual username and groupname

[William]

Nice :) But when I tried it, it needed to be sudo chmod 755 -R ./folder ---> not sure if that might be related to the flavor of linux I'm using