LINternUX

Did you know that you can reset file permission to what they were when you installed the package. This may become helpful if somebody made a mistake and change the permission on a number of files (This never happen right?). This is where the command ;
“rpm –setperms <package>” become handy.

In our example we will change the permission on the “find” command.

# Let's find out what package contains the "/usr/bin/find" command
# rpm -qf /usr/bin/find
findutils-4.2.27-5.el5

# Let's see what are the actual permission of the find program (755).
# ls -l /usr/bin/find
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 151244 Jul  7  2008 /usr/bin/find

# Let's change them to 777 with the chmod command
# chmod 777 /usr/bin/find

# Now the program "find" have this permission.
# ls -l /usr/bin/find
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 151244 Jul  7  2008 /usr/bin/find

# Let's run our command to reset all files included in the package "findutils".
# rpm --setperms findutils

# You can see now that the permission of the 'find' are back to their initial state.
# ls -l /usr/bin/find
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 151244 Jul  7  2008 /usr/bin/find

Be aware that this command only reset the permission and not the owner/group of the file, as you can see from the example below.

# ls -l /usr/bin/find
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 151244 Jul  7  2008 /usr/bin/find
# chmod 777 /usr/bin/find
# chown jacques.jacques /usr/bin/find
# ls -l /usr/bin/find
-rwxrwxrwx 1 jacques jacques 151244 Jul  7  2008 /usr/bin/find
# rpm --setperms findutils
# ls -l /usr/bin/find
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jacques jacques 151244 Jul  7  2008 /usr/bin/find