rsync
. So I google-found that
sudo mkfs /dev/sdb1
formats the preferable ext3. But then the disk ownership became
root:root. I tried to correct that with
sudo chown -R myusername:myusername
but that did not operate in the disk directory that (I thought) I
was in but on my system disk. I killed it fast but it had done
damage, at least to files in /root
. In a repair trial I
typed
sudo chown -R root:root /root/.*
where I added the period because the files and directories in
@/root
are .XXX-hidden. This was a bigger mistake: the
wildcard .*
apparently implies also ..*
so the operand
does not only go down the tree but also back up, into the system top
and then down that. This is perhaps logical but was quite unexpected
by me. And so all files on the disk became root:root, also all mine,
and sudo
would no longer work ("must be setuid root") so that I
could not reclaim ownership of my own directories and files. Upshot:
I had sudocided my usage.
Reviving my Ubuntu usership became a long story. Help came via email via my discarded MacBookPro from a Utrecht University system manager (the best I ever met) and the former graduate student mentioned above (not to be replaced by Google after all). Power on and press ESC fast before the grub loader starts, or SHIFT all the time in case yours is a single-system setup. Select and boot the recovery-mode version (probably the second entry). Cursor down to get the root command line prompt (without net access). Now you are root (superuser). Type:
chown -R myusername:myusername /home/myusername chown root:root /usr/bin/sudo chmod 111 /usr/bin/sudo chmod +s /usr/bin/sudoand then restart. That helped a lot, but many system files still had ownership root:root instead of something else. So I followed this advice to try complete package reinstallation:
sudo su - dpkg --get-selections | egrep -v deinstall | awk '{print $1}' | egrep -v '(dpkg|apt|mysql|mythtv)' | xargs aptitude -y reinstallbut that stopped after the deinstall for lack of connectivity, perhaps loss of proxy settings in the process. Much more didn't work then. The eventual remedy, after returning home, was to update from Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10 which had then become available, letting it reinstall all packages properly.