Accidentally did chown -R my.user:staff /usr in OS X

Question

I was a happy guy until when, accidentally, I did this command in my Mac Os X (Yosemite 10.10.5) a few moments a go:

$ sudo chown -R my.user:staff usr/

Then, terribly, when I try to use sudo a horrible error occurs:

$ sudo su -
sudo: effective uid is not 0, is sudo installed setuid root?

Any one have any idea about how to solve these and save my life, please?

Obs: I can't open new terminals but I still have two terminals opened, one logged with my.user and other with root.

BTW, StackOverflow is for programming questions, not questions about using your PC/Mac. — Barmar, Commented Mar 23, 2017 at 18:50

M. Galczynski · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-23 18:55:54Z

2

Maybe if you changed the owner to actually used by you user, you can change without sudo the ownership to root by chown -R root:root /usr?

answered Mar 23, 2017 at 18:55

M. Galczynski

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root# chown -R root:root /usr >>> chown: root: illegal group name
– Lucas Cleto
Commented Mar 23, 2017 at 19:01
2

@JohnSmith I checked and in macOS the groupname for root is named wheel so you need to execute chown -R root:wheel /usr
– M. Galczynski
Commented Mar 23, 2017 at 19:12
Using wheel as the root user was what worked for me. Thanks sir for saving me a new installation
– John
Commented Apr 9, 2018 at 18:24

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Lucas Cleto · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-23 19:18:19Z

1

I found this tutorial and it saved me from ruin:

Open Disk Utility, which is in the Utilities folder of your Applications folder.
Select the startup disk from the list of volumes.
Click the First Aid tab.
To check permissions, click Verify Disk Permissions. To repair permissions, click Repair Disk Permissions.

answered Mar 23, 2017 at 19:18

Lucas Cleto

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2 Answers 2