I accidentally set the permission of my hidden 'usr' to 'no access' (meant read only). Now no applications can open (they just bounce).
When trying to sudo cd
or ls
in terminal, I simply get:
bash: /usr/local/rvm/scripts/initialize: Permission denied
and
Illegal instruction: 4
respectively. Argh catch 22!
Any ideas, people?
Best Answer
Do you have a backup?
If not, you should be able to fix the permissions by booting into Single User Mode. Hold CmdS while rebooting, and in the prompt, enter
mount -uw /
.Then try running:
which should give the owner read permissions again. You can, of course, do that recursively by calling
chmod -R u+r /usr
, depending on what exactly you did to screw up your permissions.If you also changed the owner, you can set it back to
root:wheel
for/usr
and its subfolders, except for/usr/local
, which should probably beusername:admin
(whereusername
is your admin user's name).Once you're done, type
reboot
.