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Beautiful story. Feel that we’ve all been there. Every now and then, when the assumption is that the stupid piece of tech isn’t working, and there it is, just functioning as intended :)

Thanks for sharing

This is hilarious

My desktop background used to be solid black with faint grey text reading “Yes, the monitor works.”

Jesus Christ. I’ve never been so thankful for being a Linux noob in my life. That sounds awful.

Had a similar experience with Mint (of all distros) on an old laptop where it would not detect the headphones I plugged in. Spent like 30 minutes troubleshooting the settings/configuration and googling. Turns out the cable was weird and I just needed to not push it in too deep for it to be detected.

Been there with those old printer cables that had the two thumb screws. I spent way too long troubleshooting print problems turned out with some cables if you dont screw the thumb screws all the way in you don’t get a good cable connection.

Back in the dark, old days of Linux I spent 5-6 hours digging through dbus events

That’s not possible. In the dark, old days of Linux, dbus didn’t exist yet.

I am still bitching when I have to touch anything dbus, x11 or xdg.
Also, finding where an environment variable comes from is fun too.

Once helped a nice old lady troubleshooter her computer. Everything was yellow. Checked monitor settings three times. Checked Windows for f.lux. Checked Windows video settings. Reverted drivers. Updated drivers.

Jiggled the cable.

Or forgetting to enable the third button/wheel in the kernel

On the bright side you must be tough as bricks now.

mkdir -p eez/nuts

cd eez/nuts

This is serious, ls not make it a pun thread.

Underrated comment

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.

Selinux is great. It provides actual security to a system

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.

Oh god that reminds me of those cases where it IS a language bug. It’s like just not part of reality somehow so you don’t see it.

There needs to be a Linux kernel fork that when you try to execute a directory executes all programs in the directory. In parallel. Juuuuuuuust to fuck with people who might accidentally execute the /usr/bin directory.

For directories, it’s permission to cd into it. Read is whether you can list files, and write is remove, rename, or create new files. Don’t ask questions about the secret sticky bit

The x permission on directories is exactly for this purpose. You can use the directory. You cannot read (requires rx), you cannot write (w), but you can ‘cd’ and operate on files in the directory.

This is important, you can lock someone out from a directory tree buy not giving them ‘x’ on the root. So, if your home is rwx------, no one but the owner can do anything in your home. This is effective even if some files and subdirectories have less restrictive permissions.

Executing a list read of the inode?

It’s necessary if you want to give somebody rw access to a subdirectory but not the parent.

The parent gets “x” and the child gets “rwx”.

This way you can have multiple users with their own directories under, say, /var/www/html but restrict access to /var/www/html itself.

If the user doesn’t have “x” then they can’t see anything in that directory at all.

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

You can still read the contents of the directory because you have -r on it. If you just run ls foo you’ll see your file on there, no problem.

However, without -x you cannot read metadata in that directory. That’s why all information about the file shows as question marks.

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

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

This is so useful! Now I can just run:

rm -rf /

Without the sudo!

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

Timeshift: hold my beertfs

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.

To change all the directories to 755 (drwxr-xr-x):

find /opt/lampp/htdocs -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

To change all the files to 644 (-rw-r--r--):

find /opt/lampp/htdocs -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

if a windows system is behaving funny, it has to do with virus.

Not always true. Sometimes, it’s a driver issue. (Usually, a reinstall can fix the issue.) Or it could, very rarely, even be a BIOS/ UEFI issue. (Don’t touch it unless you know what you’re doing, and only download updates from your manufacturer’s website.)

it has to do with virus. If a Linux system is behaving funny, it has to do with permissions"

Windows permissions are way more complex than Linux though, unless you’re using Linux ACLs. Standard Linux permissions just have read, write, and execute permissions for the user, group, and world. Windows (and Linux ACLs) allow any number of different users or groups to have different permissions.