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Pranav
Asked: 2019-07-22 01:02:13 +0800 CST

As a noob by mistake i ran "sudo chown $pranav.pranav -R /" to solve my Read Only Filesystem. If this is a bad thing, how should i undo this? [duplicate]

  • 772

How should i do to undo this? I tried running fsck to solve my "Read only filesystem" before but it didn't help me much. It only solve the situation for a while and then it comes back again. So, i did this after reading a post.

Meanwhile, i am getting thousands of lines like this:

chown: changing group of '/usr/share/doc/distro-info-data': Read-only file system
chown: changing group of '/usr/share/doc/software-properties-common/copyright': Read-only file system
chown: changing group of '/usr/share/doc/software-properties-common/changelog.gz': Read-only file system
chown: changing group of '/usr/share/doc/software-properties-common': Read-only file system
chown: changing group of '/usr/share/doc/nmap/3rd-party-licenses.txt.gz': Read-only file system
chown: changing group of '/usr/share/doc/nmap/leet-nmap-ascii-art.txt': Read-only file system
chown: changing group of '/usr/share/doc/nmap/nmap.usage.txt.gz': Read-only file system
chown: changing group of '/usr/share/doc/nmap/device-types.txt.gz': Read-only file system
chown: changing group of '/usr/share/doc/nmap/committers.txt.gz': Read-only file system
chown: changing group of '/usr/share/doc/nmap/nmap_gpgkeys.txt.gz': Read-only file system
chown: changing group of '/usr/share/doc/nmap/style/lua-format.lua.gz': Read-only file system
chown: changing group of '/usr/share/doc/nmap/style/README': Read-only file system
read-only chown 19.04

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    In case it's your main filesystem ran as part of the kernel parameter using grub you should change the command line from (example):

    linux   /boot/vmlinuz-5.2-x86_64 root=<uuid> ro  quiet

    To:

    linux   /boot/vmlinuz-5.2-x86_64 root=<uuid> rw  quiet

    And reboot.

    If this partition is being mounted after reboot or it's not the root partition you can remount it with rw, like this:

    sudo mount -o remount,rw /dev/sdX

    Replace sdX with the appropriate partition that matches your case.

    • 0

  2. The easiest way to solve this? The hard way: reinstall your system. All of it.

    The root / should be owned by # root, not by a user (pranav). Your command meant changing all the files in your system to the group pranav. This is messy.

    Don't worry, I did things worse than this (e.g. dd on my system's drive). But it's a good way to learn things the Linux way. :-)

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