Sudo Permissions – How to Fix After ‘chmod -R 777 /usr/bin’

chmodpermissionsrootsudo

I entered chmod -R 777 /usr/bin and now sudo is not working.

It says sudo must be setuid root.

Some advice online said to run chown root:root /usr/bin/sudo
chmod 4755 /usr/bin/sudo.

On entering chown root:root /usr/bin/sudo it shows an opened in readonly mode error.

Best Answer

Accepted status notwithstanding, I'm now convinced this answer is wrong. (I hope to improve it soon, after consulting with the OP about the accept.) I think I recall others saying this worked, but I believe their problems were at least slightly different. The method described herein remains valuable for some situations where chmod -R 777 /usr/bin is interrupted with Ctrl+C or otherwise does not complete. But once it does, pkexec is un-setuid'd too and it won't work any better than sudo, as Damien Roche and Oli have rightly commented.

On an Ubuntu desktop system, PolicyKit is installed, so pkexec can be used to repair a broken sudo executable or sudoers file. You do not need to boot into recovery mode and you do not need to boot from a live CD. You don't even need to reboot.

In this case, run the following commands:

pkexec chown root:root /usr/bin/sudo
pkexec chmod 4755 /usr/bin/sudo

See this question for more information.

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