I often see users that try to fix an issue and somewhere read or just try to recursively chown
their home directory and sometimes even also reset permissions recursively to something like rwxr-xr-x
or similar.
Imagine such an owner/permission massacre – are there critical files/directories that need special permissions or to be root-owned for the system to work?
Best Answer
NO file in
~
has to be owned by root.If a software requires that a file in your home directory be owned by another user, it is a bug and should be reported as such.
Other than that, a common case involves two security-related software that require restricted permissions on certain files, namely:
SSH
See
man ssh
, sectionFILES
:Other files like
authorized_keys
,known_hosts
, etc. should be writable only by the user, but can be world-readable.GnuPG
~/.gnupg
(and contents) should be accessible only by you. With other permissions, GPG will complain about unsafe permissions.