PS1 set to -bash-3.2$ after using chmod

Question

I was following instructions to install WSJT-X (a radio software) and it had me move a file named sysctl.conf to my desktop and run the following terminal commands:

  sudo cp $HOME/Desktop/sysctl.conf /etc/
  sudo chmod 664 /etc/sysctl.conf
  sudo chown  root:wheel  /etc/sysctl.conf

After running these commands, my terminal display changed to look like this:

Whereas previously my name was before the dollar sign. Also, my date and time are now displayed incorrectly (set 8 hours in the future). Can someone please help me find out what I did wrong and how I can fix it?

If it helps, I think I accidentally inserted a space in the second command so it became

sudo chmod 664 /etc/ sysctl.conf

Answer 1

_{(Note: I'm a Linux guy and I have no experience with macOS. Take my answer with a grain of salt).}

With sudo chmod 664 /etc/ you removed execute bit from the directory and in effect you cannot access (read, write) items living within. This includes (among others):

• /etc/profile, where common PS1 is defined,
• /etc/localtime, /etc/timezone or whatever macOS uses.

You need sudo chmod 755 /etc to revert this. Unfortunately no access to /etc/sudoers will probably prevent you from doing this directly. If you're extremely lucky, you still have a shell running as root (started for whatever reason before things went wrong) where you can invoke chmod 755 /etc without sudo. But probably you're not so lucky.

If the same problem occurred in my Kubuntu (no encryption or such), I would boot live USB Linux, mount the filesystem and fix the permissions. I don't know if you can easily fix macOS "from the outside" like this.

This (oldish) question deals with a similar problem where sudo doesn't work because of wrong permissions of /etc/sudoers. Possible solutions from answers:

This may be one of the rare cases where running "Repair Disk Permissions" from Disk Utility might actually be warranted.

If that doesn't work, follow […] suggestion of booting into single user mode to fix it

This one looks promising:

Another approach is using Automator.app.

Create a new workflow that contains something like the following:

do shell script "chmod 0440 /etc/sudoers" with administrator privileges

When you run it, it'll ask for your password and (presuming you're an administrator) it'll fix it.

This also works if you've messed up the permissions on a parent directory (eg making / something other than 755).

Keep in mind you need to chmod 755 /etc, so don't blindly paste the above code. Your case falls under "messed up permissions on a parent directory".

Answer 2

You need to have the +x permission on a directory ("execute/traverse") in order to access any of the objects inside, regardless of having read permissions on those objects directly.

Your chmod 664 /etc command removed this by setting permissions to u=rw,g=rw,o=r (that's what the octal number decodes to), so now 1) the shell cannot access /etc/profile and /etc/bashrc, where the system-wide PS1 setting is kept; 2) the system cannot access /etc/localtime or its macOS equivalent, where the system-wide timezone parameters are kept.

Use chmod 775 or chmod a+x on the directory to restore it. (7 and 5 decode to =rwx and =rx.)

(Actually I'm not sure if /etc is supposed to be group-writable, even on macOS, so you might also want chmod 755 instead – or an additional chmod g-w.)