sudo chmod -R 777 /
I did this. It was a mistake. Is there any way to undo it?
Basically it's messed up more things than I can list. I don't have time-machine enabled on my mac.
Take a look at Apple's Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions feature:
From http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2963:
Using the Repair Privileges Utility
Most users of Mac OS X have not intentionally modified privileges and simply need a utility to reset system privileges to their correct default values. If you have Mac OS X 10.2 and later, this utility is included in the operating system. If you have Mac OS X 10.1 you can download it. For versions 10.0 to 10.1.4, you must update to version 10.1.5 first.
For Mac OS X 10.2 or later, open Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/). Select your Mac OS X startup volume in the column on the left of the Disk Utility window, then click the First Aid tab. Click the Repair Disk Permissions button. You may see an erroneous message.
You're in luck:
It won't fix everything, but it will fix everything that's listed in the bill of materials file for an installed package.
Repair permissions includes files that were created by an OS X installer (like /etc/sudoers), but it doesn't include files that were not preinstalled or not created by packages.
It's probably easier to back up everything, do a clean reinstall, and restore files selectively from the backup (or backups). You can restore 644 / 744 permissions with find:
find /Volumes/Second\ Backup -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \+
find /Volumes/Second\ Backup -type d -exec chmod 744 {} \+
If you can't back up files, try starting up from a recovery partition (or installation media in 10.6 and earlier) and cloning the main OS X drive from Disk Utility.
If there are some tools to revert the permissions, and people are suggesting it, you better first go with it, sudo chmod -R 777 / otherwise you may do is revert all the permissions to some safer level like
chmod -R 644
and then change the permissions to required level, when there is a conflict.
-
But its not a good way though. Just some safer approach to prevent screwing up with your files, before anything worse can happen. :(
chmod -R 644
will make all directories non-searchable. It would be difficult to recover from that.
Oct 21, 2011 at 18:26
rm -fr /
.)sudo
goes on about "think before you type" the first time you use it. ;-)ls -lR / >list
on a healthy system (or ask someone else for a list). You could automate this process to re-set the permissions (if this Dirk Utility Repair won't work).