permissions

[Mr Chris Aitken]

First of all, every time I have asked for help with permissions problems 
I'm offered a couple of things to try which don't work, then no more help...

Of course, I'm not complaining (as no one's getting paid here). The 
reason I mention this is I want to know if I am not framing the 
questions properly or if permissions problems are just too complex and 
varying to hope that list help would be enough.

Assuming it *is* possible to troubleshoot this via list help, here is my 
latest permissions problem: I have lost permission on my regular user 
account to even open a terminal. Icons have turned to red 'X's. Clearly 
I have so offended su and sudo that the system is shutting me out.

How I got myself in this jam: I use scp to backup data from computer to 
computer:

scp -r /home/thatpc/datatobackup 192.168.0.5:/otherpcbckupdrv

and

scp -r 192.168.0.5:/home/user/doc2bckup /bckupdrv

It may not be pretty but it backs up the data from machine to machine.

The problem is when I try to delete the backed up files (from time to 
time for various reasons). I don't have the permissions to do the 
deletes. So, I tried giving ownership to the regular user via 'sudo 
chown user otherpcbckupdrv'. I still couldn't delete files (because of 
parent directory permission), so I ran 'sudo chown user /'. The system 
got mad at me and now I've pooched the system in the house I've spent 
the most time on (especially gtkpod actually working with the iPod).

Please be careful with your suggestions to me. I suck at this stuff and 
it has *always* ended up with a re-install (after the helper is suddenly 
incommunicado).

Chris


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