Reminds me of the adage “you didn’t pay me $5,000 for turning that bolt. You paid me $5,000 because I knew which bolt to turn.” Experience and knowledge is valuable.

Educator here. This is called “discovery learning”. (The alternative to discovery learning, “direct instruction”, would be if someone had told OP about these permissions before OP got themselves into a pickle)

When discovery learning is successful, it leads to better learning outcomes. Compared to direct instruction, you learn the material more deeply and will have better recall of the material, often for the rest of your life. The downsides to discovery learning are that it’s very time-consuming, very frustrating, and many students will just fail (give up) before learning is completed.

Consider yourself one of the lucky ones, OP.

the 777 stands for ‘lucky jackpot number’, as in ‘youre lucky if you dont break your entire system’

Timeshift: hold my beertfs

For anyone that didn’t recognise this as a joke, do not do this!

That’s all true, except when I send you a command. You can totally trust me and just run it.

This is so useful! Now I can just run:

rm -rf /

Without the sudo!

Better than 666, which I did once 20 years ago

I set 777 to my whole file system on a install of Ubuntu back in the day and it does indeed fuck the install in lovely ways. I didn’t bother attempting recovery. Nice learning experience.

Two hard problems.

More than a decade of using linux and I still can’t remember setfacl syntax. I have better luck remembering tar syntax.

and then what is the thing that will happen to us next

But then you get the pleasure of making it submit. My Minecraft server is now running in GNU screen just like I wanted it to, and SELinux can only look on and whimper softly.

Selinux is great. It provides actual security to a system

I would argue that this is something that should be taught in every undergraduate Operating Systems course. But if someone posting it here benefits teens, self-taught hobbyists, and old-timers getting back into the field so be it.

We all started small, making mistakes. Most of us still do from time to time

There are a few people that are just getting into Unix style operating systems and we all remember and relate. Even if it was 30 years ago.

This sentence can be posted on pretty much every Lemmy post

You can also do chmod +x to add the executable bit to whatever the existing perms are.

0: no permissions
+4: read
+2: write
+1: execute

644 and 755 are the two most useful octal codes to remember because they make up the majority of files on your system. 644 is user read/write but read-only for everyone else. 755 adds execute to that, useful for scripts and directories.

Other than that, the most common other things are setting access for group and others to zero, so your ~/.ssh directory is 700 (rwx for you, no access for anyone else) and the private keys in it are 600, rw for you, no access for anyone else).

Execute just adds 1, so if you want the dir world viewable, it’s 755.

For those that don’t know, you can use three numbers, zero through eight, with the chmod command. it takes the binary of each digit to set the permissions.

$ chmod 644
 6  |  4  |  4
110 | 100 | 100
rw- | r-- | r--