anna.morris's blog

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Permissions after moving home folder to new install

My usual way of backing up and reinstalling is to copy my entire  home folder and paste it into the new OS. This sometimes leads to file ownership and permissions problems, and I used to fix these in a slow and unsafe way, by making all my files read and writable by all. Today, thanks to FX-talk, founder of KXstudio http://www.linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=10268&p=32914#p32914 I learned that running

sudo chown USER -R /home

will fix this. You can find our your user by typing

whoami

in the terminal.

I also had this issue once when moving a hard drive from one laptop to another, so its going to be useful in the future 🙂